Feisty-Beta installer: mountpoint change needs partition size change!

[Roman Polach]

During installation process of Feisty beta I choose manual partitioning option.
There were several problems around mount-points definition:
Problem 1) The first problem is that user must click "Edit" to open dialog for changing mount points
    and this dialog is also used for resizing partitions... this is very dangerous if user must
    worry about resizing partitions (and potential data loss!!) only for that he/she wants only
    set this partition to be mounted on /mnt/foo or so...
Problem 2) Problem mentioned above is even more dangerous because this dialog have set initial size for
    partition to ZERO no matter what was the original size. If user only changes mount-point and click
    close-button, partition would be destroyed (probably, I didn't try it)!!
Problem 3) Mount-points for my IDE disks' partitions were predefined to be /media/sda1,sda5,sda6.. etc.. but
    I thing the FHS standard says that /media is for removable devices and /mnt is for nonremovable
    (well I'm not sure about this, but I thing this is usual)... Anyway, I wanted these partitons to be mounted
    on /mnt/..... but I was worried about problem 1 to set them so, so I leaved /media/.... mount-points.
Problem 4) After installation gnome volume mounter applet shows along cdrom and floppy also "sda1",
    this may be caused by "Problem 3" or because this is only partition with FAT filesystem (other partitions
    have EXT3 or EXT2 filesystems and they are not shown in that applet)... anyway this is strange: sda1
    is listed and sda5, sda6 and others are not listed..
I thing problems 1 and 2 are really critical if they appear in final Feisty release.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Please file multiple problems as multiple bug reports in future; it's difficult for us to keep track otherwise. I will henceforth only consider problems 1 and 2, since I don't think the others are really problems in ubiquity: /media/* is something we've always used, the FHS doesn't specify mount points for fixed media, /mnt is only for temporary mounts, /media/* is only intended as a reasonable default which can be changed, and I guess problem 4 is a problem in GNOME.

I'm interested in why the initial size showed up as zero; could you please attach /var/log/syslog and /var/log/partman to this bug, following the directions in http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingUbiquity/AttachingLogs? Thanks in advance.

[Vivien Malerba (malerba)]

I confirm I've had the same problem, except that for point 2), the dialog initially proposed to resize the partition to some non zero value. Note that I simply set that size to the actual size of the existing partition and then everything went Ok (though I would of course not do this on a production machine).

For me this needs to be corrected before I can do any installation on a production machine, I would classify it as highly critical.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Bug 95400 may well be a good chunk of this, but I need the logs from the original reporter (rather than other people's, which might be a different problem) before I can be sure.

[Roman Polach (rpolach)]

- I still got the "0" size
- setting actual size as described in https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/95619/comments/2 works..

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks. This definitely looks like bug 95400. Running 'sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install ubiquity' from a terminal window before starting the installation should let you work around this.

[Andreas Schildbach (schildbach)]

Colin, this problem (point 2 from the summary: Partition size set to 0 when editing partition) is still present in Feisty release! There is no newer version of ubiquity at the moment.

[Roman Polach (rpolach)]

this problem is still present in feisty final,
but 95400 is Marked fixed. Could this bug be un-duped then?
Or should I fill exactly same bugreport again according to note
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/partman-partitioning/+bug/95400/comments/11
?

[Andreas Schildbach (schildbach)]

Unduping because problem #2 still persists in Feisty release.

[Roman Polach (rpolach)]

re-posting current behavior in feisty final installer
from https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/partman-partitioning/+bug/95400/comments/9 :

1) When attempt to change mount-point, partition size is initialy set to "0",
2) then (after clicking into mount-point editbox) it has changed to "used size" value instead of "total size",
3) when attempt to manually fill correct value (25531), it changed it to 25500

This should be fixed by all of these steps:
a) allow to set correct (original) size and do not change it to some other value if it is valid!!
b) allow user change mount-point with different dialog than that with resize ability to not make user worry about destroying the partition only when he wants to assign mount-point!
c) predefine initial value shown to actual "total size"

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Turns out that this was because of a rounding error in the communication between ubiquity and partman, which led ubiquity to believe that the current size of the partition was outside the resize bounds, which then caused the spinbutton to behave oddly. Really the rounding error ought to be fixed, but that involves some harder work down in the plumbing. In the meantime, I've just worked around it in the frontends by having them extend the bounds of the spinbutton as necessary.

The original problem #1 still remains, but should be much less severe now.

[MillenniumBug (millenniumbug)]

This bug report is several years old and concerns obsolete versions of Ubuntu. It has now been marked 'invalid'.

If the bug still appears in Ubuntu 10.10, feel free to open a new report.