ubiquity mishandles answer to xfs on /boot question

Perhaps that it's better. XFS on /boot is a VERY BAD idea. Why not stay with a read-only ext2?

Why would that be a VERY BAD idea?

XFS on /boot works just fine. This is a Ubuntu/Debian specific issue.

Pascal de Bruijn a écrit :
> Why would that be a VERY BAD idea?
>
> XFS on /boot works just fine. This is a Ubuntu/Debian specific issue.
>
>
Of course it works. But it's space consuming for no-interest! And
prevent the use of Grub!

No, you don't understand... GRUB can be made to work.

And XFS has clear advantages in certain situations. So xfsprogs needs to be on the CD anyways, so having XFS on /boot will not require any extra space.

It should be possible to use a single filesystem type on all your devices.

Please note, other distro like Fedora have XFS on boot working, so this probably is a Debian/Ubuntu specific bug.

Pascal de Bruijn a écrit :
> No, you don't understand... GRUB can be made to work.
>
I never succeeded!
> And XFS has clear advantages in certain situations. So xfsprogs needs to
> be on the CD anyways, so having XFS on /boot will not require any extra
> space.
>
>
It's not xfsprogs the problem. It's the fact that on a 20mB /boot,
several MBs will be lost for xfs structures... It's really ridiculous.

Triaged to Confirmed. XFS may become more popular in the future and ubiquity will need to be able to handle it. Otherwise, ubiquity will break multiple OS installs that have XFS already installed.

Perhaps GRUB can be made to work if you're lucky, but it's a race condition; XFS can't be forced to write data out to disk such that GRUB's later raw disk reads can get at it, except by unmounting and remounting the filesystem (which isn't feasible at that point in the installation). For some people it will work by chance, but those people are lucky.

This is bug 8058.

That said, Pascal is right about the UI bug, so I'll fix that here.

This bug was fixed in the package ubiquity - 1.7.14

---------------
ubiquity (1.7.14) hardy; urgency=low

  [ Mario Limonciello ]
  * Drop all references to mythappearance.
  * Use x11vnc instead of vnc4server which is broke in Hardy.
  * Add support for PVR-350 TV-Out.
  * Only remove themes when selected for removal.
  * Update included mythweb postinst for trunk behavior.

  [ Colin Watson ]
  * Split iso_3166.tab lines by tabs, fixing an infinite loop on countries
    whose names contain more than one word (LP: #193329).
  * Drop all privileges and set HOME before launching a browser to read
    release notes (LP: #194727).
  * Explicitly depend on ntfsprogs for NTFS resizing.
  * Print a traceback as well as the exception message if
    DebconfFilter.process_line raises an exception.
  * Enable debconf's escape capability for communications between the filter
    and the underlying frontend by default. Split arguments to filtered
    commands into only as many arguments as are required by the command.
    This should fix autopartitioning in certain locales (LP: #177623).
  * In ubiquity-dm, fall back to xfwm4 if metacity fails (unifying gtk_ui
    and mythbuntu_ui handling in the process). Avoid hardcoding full paths
    where possible.
  * Fix reversed handling of answer to grub-installer/install_to_xfs
    (LP: #138422).
  * Update translations from Launchpad.

  [ Evan Dandrea ]
  * partman/confirm_new_label is now partman-
    partitioning/confirm_new_label (LP: #190036).
  * Add ubiquity/automation_failure_command debconf question which is called
    whenever user interaction is required. This includes non-fatal error
    dialogs. ubiquity/failure_command is now only called when the installer
    crashes.
  * Make the zoomed in tzmap bigger and the points smaller. Only select one
    timezone at a time.
  * Add a --no-continue option to disable the continue using the Live CD
    button when running in only-ubiquity mode (LP: #195935).
  * Automatic update of included source packages: apt-setup
    1:0.31ubuntu6, console-setup 1.21ubuntu3, debian-installer-utils
    1.50ubuntu2, partman-auto 73ubuntu3, partman-base 114ubuntu2, user-
    setup 1.16ubuntu4.

 -- Evan Dandrea <email address hidden> Fri, 29 Feb 2008 11:59:45 -0500