karmic ubiquity installer hangs in partitioner after dismounting 2nd drive

[John Gilmore]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

UNR karmic beta, installing on Acer Aspire OneD250 netbook. Netbook has internal SATA hard drive, containing both Windows and a bug-aborted install of Karmic. Also plugged into it is an external USB drive with an NTFS partition on it (used sometimes by the Windows install on this netbook).

Installing from external USB CD drive. Checked the CD from boot menu - it's good.

Did live run. Then hit Install to disk.

Got through the questions to step 3, chose "USA" keyboard as
recommended. Got a pop-up "Unmount partitions that are in use?" about
would I like to unmount /dev/sdb (the external USB drive) because it has partitions on it I
won't be able to mess with in the installer. Went out into a
terminal, "df -h", sure, there's an unrelated filesystem on that
drive, so I told the pop-up to unmount it ("Yes"). It did.

But immediately after, it hangs with "Starting up the partitioner" in
a pop-up on the screen, with scroll bar at 70%, saying "Detecting file
systems...". I've let it sit here for about ten minutes, it isn't moving.
Cursor is a rotating circle. The "Quit" button at the bottom of the
screen is white (not grey) but hitting it has no effect. There is no
close box or quit box on the pop-up. (There's a tiny circle on the left
that pops up a menu, but the menu has "Close" greyed-out!)

"ps ax" shows pid 5282 "/bin/sh /lib/partman/update.d/20detected_filesystem /va\
r/lib/partman/devices/=dev=sdb 5 ....."

*** BUG2: ubiquity provides no way out when partitioner hangs.

When I restarted, unplugged the USB external hard drive, and tried again, this problem did
not occur.

So I restarted, plugged it in again, rebooted the CD. Tried doing "ubiquity -d" based on
reading other bug reports. Got same problem.

Then after reading more ubiquity bug reports, I installed the latest ubiquity and webkit:

Apt-get update; apt-get install libwebkit-1.0-2 (1.1.15.2-1) ubiquity (2.0.0)

(As suggested in lp#452796).

Got same hang. I've attached syslog, partman, and installer/debug files.

[John Gilmore (gnu-gilmore)]

These logs include both tries (initial try with ubiquity -d from UNR beta CD; second try after apt-get install the latest ubiquity and libwebkit).

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

Karmic reached end of life some time ago, are you able to reproduce this with 12.04+?

[John Gilmore (gnu-gilmore)]

It's only "end of life" because the bug-handling team sat on it without action for four years. This bug is not MY problem, it's yours.

No, I am neither able nor willing to reproduce this with a later Ubuntu release. I've switched to Fedora.

If you actually care about addressing the bug that I wasted a few hours chasing down and reporting to you, the bug report contains all the information that YOU need to reproduce it (on Karmic or any later release). I did my part. You could've tried to reproduce it, then reported "I can't reproduce it, neither in Karmic nor the latest release", showing good faith on your part, and then it would be worth my time to help chase it down. But since your response is just a lazy attempt to chivvy the bug into a "closed due to EOL" status without actually doing any work to solve the underlying problem, why should I waste any more time here? If I did reproduce it in 12.04 or 13.10, I have every reason to expect another multi-year delay and then another demand that if I don't work on it some more, you'll just close it unfixed.

I suggest making a new category for "bugs closed because we aren't interested in addressing them" and closing it into that category. It'll be a very popular category. Merely closing the bug would leave the incorrect implication that it had been fixed -- or even investigated.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

That's great.. you have a nice day then.