Obscure scary warning in installer.

Bug #57787 reported by John McCabe-Dansted
10
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
partman-base (Ubuntu)
Triaged
Low
Unassigned
Nominated for Karmic by Dan Kegel

Bug Description

Binary package hint: ubiquity

I found the following warning misleading and obtuse

"WARNING: This will destroy all data on any partitions you have removed as well as on the partitions that are going to be formatted.

  The following partitions are going to be formatted:
     partition #9 of /dev/hdc as swap
     partition #3 of /dev/hdc as ext3"

I believe that in this case no data will be erased; that all data will be created from unpartitioned space. This warning does not make it clear whether this is the case.

Also, "Partition #9" will mean nothing to an end user. They would really want to know "what data is on partition #9". The following would have more meaning:
  What are the current contents of hdc9? (I.e. have a button that allows user to browse hdc9 in Nautilus)
  Is partition #9 a new or empty partition?
  If #9 is not empty, how much space is used?
  How big is #9?

Also to a savvy user /dev/hdc9 would be more clear than " partition #9 of /dev/hdc".

Colin Watson (cjwatson)
Changed in partman-base:
status: Unconfirmed → Confirmed
importance: Untriaged → Low
Revision history for this message
Adam Niedling (krychek) wrote :

This isn't really a bug and it requires more discussion. Maybe adding this to brainstorm.ubuntu.com would make it get more attention. I'm closing this as there was no activity in more than two years.

Changed in partman-base:
status: Confirmed → Invalid
Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

Usability issues are still bugs, and putting this in brainstorm will just make it harder for the developers to find.

Changed in partman-base:
status: Invalid → Triaged
Revision history for this message
Dan Kegel (dank) wrote :

Worse still, when I installed Karmic alpha 4 just now, it told me that /home would be
formatted when I explicitly didn't check the 'format' button. I suspect
this "Ready for Installation" screen is sloppily written when it
comes to the partition format warning, and doesn't check to see
whether the partition is actually going to be formatted. (Either
that, or the earlier screen is marking partitions for formatting
when the user didn't ask for it, which would be worse.)

I played it safe and didn't even have the installer mount /home!

This part at least should be fixed for Karmic.

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