fsck.fat changes key for "do nothing" action between menus

Bug #1395330 reported by Volker Siegel
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
dosfstools (Ubuntu)
New
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

The program interacts with the user by a text mode line-by-line interface.
It consists of a sequence of menus, where the choice is made by entering a number.

For context, assume the user starts the program, but intends to make no changes at all.
That could be done by choosing the "No action" option in each menu.

$ sudo fsck /dev/sda1
fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
fsck.fat 3.0.26 (2014-03-07)
0x41: Dirty bit is set. Fs was not properly unmounted and some data may be corrupt.
1) Remove dirty bit
2) No action
? 2
There are differences between boot sector and its backup.
This is mostly harmless. Differences: (offset:original/backup)
  65:01/00
1) Copy original to backup
2) Copy backup to original
3) No action
? 3
[ ... ]

After the first menu, I hoped to see a "No action" items in the following menus too, so I can just cancel each action by choosing it with the key 2.
In the next menu, I was happy to see it also has a "No action" item.
But I was very surprised that in the second menu, 2 applies a change! I noticed almost too late.

Now, technically the menus work fine.
But something in the UI design is wrong.

When looking at it like just a normal user interface, I see the following problems here:
 - reassigning the key for a command
 - doing this between two consecutive UI interactions
 - doing this with the most conservative action, used to be on the safe side.
 - doing this in a tool run by root, accessing and changing disks directly.

Proposed solution:
    Use the key 0 for "No action" consistently.
    There is not the usual problem of fixing it breaking an established key map, because of this very bug itself.
    Also, I have seen this elsewhere, it may be even the common way to do it.

To post a comment you must log in.
This report contains Public information  
Everyone can see this information.

Other bug subscribers

Remote bug watches

Bug watches keep track of this bug in other bug trackers.