Partition type "dont_use" is ambiguous

[era]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

While googling for hints for a different problem in the Hardy beta 2008-03-20 installer I came across a thread on ubuntuforums http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4695932

To make this bug report self-contained, I'm taking the liberty to quote the dialogue from that thread here.

mikebravo: When you select MANUAL install you allocate space, assign a mount point and designate a file system e.g. ext3, swap, or fat32. On the drop down list of file systems you also get a " dont_use " option. What is that for and how do you use it? Every time I select dont_use the partitioning crashes. Surely it is there for a reason.

markusf21: this is just a guess but I think it's probably something that didn't get finished. Besides it clearly says do not use. So don't use it.

When I first stumbled over this I merely thought it was amusing. But now that I think about it again, I think it's pretty clear that there is a usability problem here. We have two presumably normally intelligent and perhaps even moderately technically sophisticated persons reasoning about what it does, and ending up at the wrong conclusion.

Could the label be made slightly less terse, in the interest of communicating what it's for?

Longer term, wouldn't it be nice if there was a balloon next to each file system type explaining what it's good for, but for now, I'd suggest simply changing "dont_use" to some slightly longer human-readable text like "don't make any changes to this partition".

(The crashing bug mikebravo was experiencing I guess must be bug #132611 which is marked as Fix Released since recently. I think that was what I was having a problem with, too.)

Sorry, no version information, I'm no longer inside the live CD, but I saw this in the Hardy beta from 2008-03-20.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

At around the same time as I fixed bug 132611, I also did this:

  * Use localised, human-readable names for partitioning methods.

This results in this being displayed as "do not use the partition" instead, which I think fixes this bug.