[Bug 766265] Re: Ubiquity proceeds to use free space without warning

[Erick Brunzell]

Thought I should add a comment here. I'm really torn about this, first
of all take into consideration that I'm now quite used to the behavior
and since it's expected my personal opinion becomes biased. Recent
improvements in the explanatory text tends to make me think we're OK in
most common installation scenarios, but certainly the test cases in
posts #9 and #21 still exist.

Also if someone has free space available on an existing drive and
installs another blank drive smaller than the available free space on
that existing drive, then selecting "install alongside" would end up
installed in the wrong free space, but personally I think anyone with
multiple drives should use the manual install (something else) option.
Is it possible to make the installer truly foolproof?

At this point I feel that my personal opinion is nearly worthless
regarding this issue, I certainly hate to see us introduce any radical
changes this late in Oneiric and with P being LTS I'd be equally scared
to mess around very much during it's dev cycle. And I don't see how this
could result in data loss so at worst it's an inconvenience, that is a
person may have to reformat the free space they didn't want to use and
then reinstall properly.

Ultimately I'd like to hear Colin Watson's opinion on this.

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Foundations Bugs, which is subscribed to ubiquity in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/766265

Title:
  Ubiquity proceeds to use free space without warning

Status in Release Notes for Ubuntu:
  New
Status in “ubiquity” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in “ubiquity” source package in Natty:
  Won't Fix
Status in “ubiquity” source package in Oneiric:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Release note:

  If there is at least 5.2 GB of unpartitioned space available on a
  disk, the installer will elect to create an Ubuntu partition in that
  space for the "Install Ubuntu alongside ..." option.  While the normal
  "Install Ubuntu alongside ..." option has a second page for resizing a
  partition, this variant does not.  Pressing "Install Now" will
  immediately start the installation.

  Original bug report follows:

  Binary package hint: ubiquity

  This is really a continuation of bug 652852. Please just begin reading
  about post #35, and apologies in advance if I'm just being impatient.

  We've progressed greatly with this and I know it's not been easy for
  the ubuntu-installer team, particularly Colin and Evan, but I'm still
  concerned about the option to "use largest continuous free space"
  being lumped into "install alongside".

  I have read the spec provided by Evan:

  https://docs.google.com/View?id=dfkkjjcj_101gnkrpg5v#4_5_1_Automatic_partitioning_o_8475526086986065

  Maybe I'm misunderstanding what this means, [maps to resize_use_free
  or use_biggest_free] ????????????

  But ATM the fact is that "install alongside" will use as little as
  10GB, which IMHO is good, but having chosen "alongside" and having no
  opportunity to verify what the installer is going to do certainly
  freaked me out the first time. Quite factually if adequate unallocated
  space exists and you choose "install alongside" the installation just
  begins - period!

  Several questions come to mind. I've not tried it yet but what if I
  had adequate free space on each of two drives? How about adequate free
  space on a USB flash drive?

  It just seems scary to have the installation begin with no idea what
  it's doing. Does that make sense?

  I'm just trying to avoid any nightmare scenarios for noobs.

  OT but I have tried the 'live-upgrade' and 'wubi-if-4-primaries-exist' options and they appear to work great, of course it's impossible to recreate every potential scenario.
  ---
  Architecture: i386
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
  LiveMediaBuild: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release i386 (20110422)
  LiveMediaBuild_: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release i386 (20110422)
  Package: ubiquity 2.6.9
  PackageArchitecture: i386
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=en_US:en
   PATH=(custom, no user)
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
  ProcVersionSignature_: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
  Tags:  natty natty
  Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic i686
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
  UserGroups:

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-release-notes/+bug/766265/+subscriptions