Comment 28 for bug 766265

I don't really want to get into things like the situation in comment #21 as part of this bug. Those tend to be the responsibility of entirely separate bits of the codebase, even if they look superficially related, and generally it helps bug management if we restrict bugs to things that can be fixed by single logical changes. (In that case, I expect that perhaps partman-auto decided that it was unable to offer this option for some reason, perhaps due to restrictions of the awful MBR partition table format, or perhaps due to a bug. Multi-boot scenarios really stretch the MBR format, particularly when you're already close to the primary partition limit.) Likewise, issues due to the size fudge factors being wrong are definitely separate.

I'm also personally not very keen on adding more options back to the simplified automatic partitioning screen. This is a design tradeoff, and really this is Matthew Paul Thomas' bailiwick rather than mine; but personally I think it's OK to present a smaller (and hence less confusing) array of options, even if some of them may be ambiguous in the face of situations where there are multiple disks with free space. A "largest continuous free space" option could easily end up using a USB disk unintentionally, for instance, so is not necessarily better. My feeling is that making this clearer would require extensive design work, for example showing a graphical representation of the desired state of all the disks in your system, and that's starting to overload the automatic partitioning screen. I'm happy for design to continue thinking about this, obviously, but I am in no rush to make changes here that feel as though they could have very substantial knock-on effects in terms of other bugs they'd create. My feeling (which I admit isn't backed up by research) is that people with multiple disks will on the whole be more aware than average about what's on which disk, and thus will be more likely to select manual partitioning options anyway if it concerns them.

However, going back to comment #15, you note that the button is labelled "Continue" rather than "Install Now" when an "alongside" option is selected; and that *is* a clear bug. If you switch to a different option and then back, the button changes to "Install Now". I'll look into fixing that, at least.