partition resizing UI breaks me every time

[James Troup]

Binary package hint: debian-installer

Twice now, I've done netboot installs of Feisty and the resize an existing partition UI has broken me. It brings up a page, I can't remember all it says, but the input box is definitely 'New partition size: '. Reading that and the rest of the page, I assumed that meant 'how big do you want the new partition that you're creating for Ubuntu to be?', in fact what it means is 'how big do you want the existing partition to be after it's been resized?'. This is horribly non-obvious, and I don't think it's just me as I tested a random cow-orker and he failed the UI test in the same way I did.

[James Troup (elmo)]

James Troup <email address hidden> writes:

> Twice now, I've done netboot installs of Feisty and the resize an
> existing partition UI has broken me. It brings up a page, I can't
> remember all it says, but the input box is definitely 'New partition
> size: '. Reading that and the rest of the page, I assumed that meant
> 'how big do you want the new partition that you're creating for Ubuntu
> to be?', in fact what it means is 'how big do you want the existing
> partition to be after it's been resized?'. This is horribly non-
> obvious, and I don't think it's just me as I tested a random cow-orker
> and he failed the UI test in the same way I did.

So in trying to fix up from this, why it's the way it is starts to
make a little more sense. If you're doing manual partitioning, you
only get to the 'New partition size' dialog from being within the
dialog for a partition, and clicking on the 'resize this partition'.
So 'New partition size' makes sense in that context. The problems
comes when you reach that screen from the guided partitioning,
specifically, the 'resize something to get me free space' option.
When you go that route you've lost the partition context and the
dialog is utterly confusing.

(If any of that makes any sense.)

--
James

[Thomas Hotz (thotz-deactivatedaccount)]

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