Comment 12 for bug 1325786

Hi,

I'm sorry. Afaik this bug was introduced in Ubuntu 13.10 and it affected Ubuntu 13.10, Mint 16, Ubuntu 14.04 and Mint 17 (MATE and Cinnamon editions). We got a bug report on Mint 16 and the Ubuntu guys got one on 13.10, but it went under the radar and it's only now after getting feedback from the stable 17 that we're able to identify this issue and fix it.

I wish we could have done that immediately with Mint 16 or that we could have done that during the RC process, but it's only after 17 stable that it happened. Ubiquity is upstream from us, and is partly also upstream from Ubuntu (it uses a lot of components coming from Debian.. d-i, partman etc.). The nature of the bug was also misleading for developers because it was easy to attribute this to a user mistake or an opinion/interpretation.

You can see for instance in the upstream bug that this didn't really catch Ubuntu's attention as a proper bug yet. And you can see also at the beginning of this report that my first reaction was to tell the OP he had assumed too much.

It's really hard for distributions the size of Mint or Ubuntu to be aware of every single bug report we get, and even more so to validate them, identify their cause, reproduce them and get to the stage where the fault gets to the right developer and action is taken. Sometimes there's one particular bit of info in one piece of feedback we get that rings out of all of that, or someone who gets out of the crowd and manages to reach out to us directly and show us exactly what we need to see to put that above every other concern. We get that often. When it relates to something critical, like here, it feels both great (because we can fix it) and frightening (when we discover what was there).

Between the release of the MATE/Cinnamon editions and the release of the Xfce edition, time has passed. Many bugs were fixed during the first RC, but we're still learning. Xfce comes with this issue fixed, it also comes with fixes for corrupted APT sources in the event where / isn't formatted, it comes with better support for Wine/Steam games, out of the box deps for Skype etc etc.. we're always improving. Some bugs are quick to identify, others like this one are deceiving and span across multiple releases.

The LTS strategy means we won't accept new features into the installer for at least 2 more years, which reduces the chances of regressions like this one. As you can see there's a delay, whether the features come from upstream, or from our own team, between the moment the code change creates a regression and the moment we realize it and fix it. The absence of changes is a very positive thing in terms of stability.

I'm very sorry some of you lost data and I hope you're able to recover it. The label was indeed misleading and it didn't indicate the installer would wipe the drive. I'm sure Ubuntu will come to the same conclusion. I hope you'll accept our apologies for letting that through our nets and please rest assured we're taking it very seriously.