Automatic partitioning is not smart

[LKRaider]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

This is a feature request to make the auto-partitioning smarter, in the sense of choosing a good partition layout based on the actual disk layout of the user, and most importatly reducing techie-talk and decision-making while installing Ubuntu.

The proposal is to develop algorithm(s) to make the partitioning decisions for the user and present the options using as little technical terms as possible.

The premise here is that Partitioning is major alien-talk to non techies, so talking about primary and logical partitions, /boot, /home and /blahblah on install time is just asking for trouble.

A (small) list of auto-generated good partitioning options should be presented to the user, while still allowing the use of the advanced/manual partitioner if desired.

As an example:
 * The installer detects the user has a primary partition occupying the whole of the disk.
 * The algorithm then detects if it can resize the partition and evaluates the free space it can get while still leaving reasonable free-space on hda1 for the system install.
 * It evaluates a number of possible partitioning layouts and ranks them on flexibility, safety of user data, etc.
 * The highest ranked layout is returned as the default option to the user, while giving the user the option to see other top (3 ?) ranked layouts or to manually edit.

I hope this interests the developers, as for sure it will help all users :)

[Phil Bull (philbull)]

This seems like quite a substantial undertaking. Would it be worth creating a spec?

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Completing the UI changes specified in https://blueprints.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/ue-partitioning-tool would deal with this.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

The bug report doesn't seem to take into account that we already do much of this, though. A resize option is already presented if possible. Note, though, that there are some problems (notably a bug in parted affecting certain newer ext3 partition creation options) that can make it impossible to present the resize option.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

This has been taken care of for years.