Partition tool in installer refreshes unnecessarily

[Bob/Paul]

Using the Installer wizard on the Feisty Live/Install CD can be extremely annoying, almost to the point of excruciating, if a custom partition table of just a few items is requested.

For some reason the partition editor has deemed it necessary to refresh and scan the disks after every action, whether one creating or deleting a partition, specifying how a partition should be used, or simply ticking the box to format the chosen filesystem.

This wouldn't be so bad /if/ the changes were taking place at that time. However, absolutely no changes are made to the disk until the "Finish" button on the installer is clicked and the install is underway. There is absolutely no reason to refresh the the partition view this frequently. It will always be as it was the last time the table was checked.

The last install I performed took me over 10 minutes just to mess with the partitioning. This is ridiculous. GParted was confusing to some users, but at least it didn't take forever.

[Markus Thielmann (thielmann)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.

This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers.
You can learn more about finding the right package at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage .

I have classified this bug as a bug in debian-installer

[Bob/Paul (ubuntu-launchpad-bobpaul)]

Thanks, but this issue affects the GUI installer, not the alternate CD. I'm still not sure what the correct package should be, but I don't think debian-installer is correct.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I agree that ubiquity's partitioner needs to be optimised. Some of this is just slowness in partman, although some of the places where ubiquity currently asks partman for information could be (carefully!) hardcoded in ubiquity.

Ubiquity's former use of GParted was not only confusing, but also wrong in ways that sometimes resulted in serious data loss and were fundamentally extremely hard to fix in place. I hope it's clear why my first priority in writing the new partitioner was correctness rather than speed.

You aren't quite accurate that there is no reason to refresh the partition view. The reason refreshes happen at the moment is that, even though the partitions aren't necessarily changing, the available options for each partition may well change: for instance, changing the type of a partition to fat32 means that it can no longer be mounted on /. These options are generated by code that's (intentionally!) common to the alternate and desktop installers, and running it involves calling out to refresh the partition view. I do absolutely concede that it is not done efficiently at the moment, and that it would be possible to (a) refresh in fewer circumstances, (b) refresh fewer partitions, (c) speed up refreshes. I hope we'll be able to work on this in Gutsy.

[vzabalza (vzabalza)]

I understand that this is a very critical aspect of the installation and all care possible must be taken for users not to mess up theirs disks completely. However, I just made an installation and after frustratingly waiting more than three minutes after every change I made (even something unharmful as changing mountpoints), I ended up closing ubiquity, firing up parted, repartitioning and then going back to ubiquity to install (after yet two more system-wide filesystem scans). I really think this is a major concern for the installer, specially as scanning multiple times the filesystems is not really critical.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

If I didn't already think this was a major concern, I would not have set this bug's importance to High. There is no need to post further comments on this bug trying to convince us that it is important.

[Stéphane Ascoët (stephane-ascoet)]

Instead of discovering the weel again, why not replacing this tool by a link to gparted or qtparted?

[Bob/Paul (ubuntu-launchpad-bobpaul)]

Stéphane: Previous versions of ubiquity did use GParted. Colin explains why this was changed in his comment on 2007-05-23.

[imag1 (ivan-trouvetout)]

A similar problem exists with the external drive.
Want to have when run over a scanner it is the drive and mount the partition
Realize that any change impossible

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I'm gathering partitioner rescan slowness bugs as bug 89357.