Ubiquity manual partitioner "Edit partition" dialogue could be improved

[pablomme]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

This is a feature request. The behaviour is as described as of Lucid alpha 3 (as well as earlier versions), which comes with ubiquity 2.1.27.

In the manual partitioner included with the ubiquity installer, selecting a partition and clicking "Change..." brings up a dialogue with the options "New partiion size in megabytes", "Use as", "Format the partition" and "Mount point".

The value of "Use as" can be "do not use partition" as well as several file system types "Ext4 journaling file system", etc, which defaults to "do not use partition". The value of "Mount point" is an editable string, with a set of optional predefined values "/", "/boot", "/home", etc, which defaults to an empty string.

The presence of "do not use partition" in "Use as" makes the dialogue harder to use, since its default value is not the current partition type but "do not use partition". And the label "Use as" really only suits that option; "Type" would be a much better fit for the file system types.

The "do not use partition" value would seem to go much better under "Mount point" instead, which could actually be called "Use as".

In my opinion, this dialogue should be redesigned to look like this, from top to bottom:

- "Use as" option. Selects whether to use the partition or not (i.e., to add it to /etc/fstab or not) and where to mount it. Selecting the "do not use" option (possibly by leaving the text field blank) would make the rest of the dialogue be greyed out, since what business would the user possibly have modifying a partition through the installer if it's not going to be used. A special value of "swap", included in the predefined list, would make it a swap partition.
- "Type" option, allowing to choose between file system types, and defaulting to the current type of the partition. Should be greyed out when "do not use" is selected for "Use as" and pre-selected to "swap" and greyed out when "Use as" is "swap".
- "New partition size in megabytes" option, defaulting to the current partition size (as it currently does). Greyed out when "Use as" is "do not use".
- "Format the partition" option, defaulting to no, greyed out when "Use as" is "do not use" or "swap".

The "Use as" option could also be split into a "Use partition" checkbox and a mountpoint selector. The "swap" option could become its own checkbox too if considered appropriate, greying out the mountpoint selector when checked.

I always update Ubuntu by doing fresh installs keeping my "/home" partition and reformatting my "/" partition, and I've always thought that dialogue didn't quite fit the logic of what it's supposed to do. The above sounds a bit more reasonable to me.

[pablomme (pablomme)]

Note: bug #302638 would be fixed if the above proposal was implemented.

[Aaron Whitehouse (aaron-whitehouse)]

I completely agree with this suggestion and came here to report the same myself.

One further suggestion that I would have would be to reverse the "Format" checkbox and "Type" dropdown, so that the format checkbox came first. To my mind, the logical order of questions (after the mountpoint question) is "Do you want to format this partition?". If the user doesn't want to format the partition, you can't ask what to format it to. If the user does want to format it, it then makes sense to ask what to format it to.

While obvious to some, others may not realise why they cannot deselect format if they happen to choose a different filesystem.

[Etienne URBAH (eurbah)]

I agree with pablomme and Aaron Whitehouse.

On top of that, the 'Edit partition' dialog must permit to set :

- Partition labels (for example on GPT),

- Filesystem labels (on partitions to be formatted, defaulting to current value).

This is related to bug #1027533

Improving this, would, inside '/etc/fstab', ease the use of human-readable PARTLABEL= or LABEL= instead of ugly UUID=

Globally, this is a strong user friendliness issue, and I suggest to increase its importance from 'Wishlist' to a higher value.