partitioner hangs in an infinite loop with 'manual partitioning' option

[Steve Langasek]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

choosing the 'manual' partitioning option in ubiquity, partman gets itself into an infinite loop before displaying the partition list. If I kill it off and run it by hand from the console, I see error messages on stderr about udpkg and anna-install being missing, which may explain the infinite loop.

The udpkg calls are only used for querying the architecture with --print-architecture, so ubiquity can probably get away with shipping udpkg as a symilnk to dpkg. The anna-install calls need to be bypassed altogether, since we can't install udebs in the liveCD environment. It looks like bundling partman-lvm in ubiquity might be enough to get around this so that anna-install doesn't get called?

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

I've just tested ubiquity in kubuntu as well in a virtual environment, where I selected the guided partitioning option. Here, ubiquity crashes at the partitioning stage; running partman from console gives me the same errors about anna-install not being available.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package ubiquity - 1.9.1

---------------
ubiquity (1.9.1) intrepid; urgency=low

  [ Evan Dandrea ]
  * Fixed the missing definition of HOSTNAME_BADDOTS, which was causing a
    crash when the user entered a hostname that ended in a dot.
  * Fix a crash introduced by the fix for LP: 40590.

  [ Jonathan Riddell ]
  * ubiquity-frontend-kde depends on kde-window-manager (KDE 4), not kwin
    (KDE 3).

  [ Colin Watson ]
  * Update file name for apt-setup 1:0.32.
  * Add apt-setup local generator to improve preseeding facilities.
  * KDE frontend: Use kdesudo-kde4 for now, and adjust ubiquity-wrapper to
    look for it in /usr/lib/kde4/bin/ (LP: #247537).
  * Automatic update of included source packages (limited to those packages
    where ubiquity code already expects newer versions): apt-setup
    1:0.37ubuntu2, partconf 1.27, partman-auto 78ubuntu1, partman-auto-loop
    0ubuntu15, partman-base 121ubuntu3, partman-basicfilesystems 60ubuntu1,
    partman-basicmethods 39ubuntu1, partman-efi 17ubuntu1, partman-ext3
    52ubuntu1, partman-jfs 26ubuntu1, partman-newworld 19ubuntu1,
    partman-partitioning 59ubuntu2 (LP: #247519), partman-reiserfs
    41ubuntu1, partman-target 55ubuntu1, partman-xfs 41ubuntu1.

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:19:10 +0100

[Harvey Muller (hlmuller)]

This bug is present in Ubuntu desktop i386 daily-live dated 12 and 11 October. It was found in both cdrom and liveusb media. There is either a regression, or the problem was not correctly identified.

I confirmed it by manually starting ubiquity in a terminal with the --debug option. It does indeed enter a loop, and cannot get out.