On Tue, Mar 31, 2026 at 09:59:04PM -0700, Jose R Rodriguez wrote:
The d-i Partman system is a collection of modules which, in theory,
should make its management easier. In practice, notwithstanding, based
on list discussions, seems no one understands fully the
inter-relationship of the modules -- as sometimes/often when a change
is made in one/two elements of the set the outcome is not the intended
one. There are from a few to quantious examples in the lists.
As far as I know, partman isnt even fully preseedable yet.
I once did a survey in an installation with a five-digit number of
Debian installations about how teams would want disk partitioning, and
the unisono answer was "let me script this".
Not even a compromise like "let us settle on a standard partitioning
with reasonably small / and /var, allowing you to resize /var and create
more file systems in your puppet code" did reach consensus.
The more I think about it, the more I get convinced that the most
flexible way with the least changes in the installer is to just let
partman optionally be a no-op if there is already something mounted on
/target, so that the local admin can set the disk and basic filesystems
up in an early_command, or to have a dedicated pre-partitioning hook to
download and execute a script. Even a huge installation like the one I
mentioned above will have some understanding about their fleet, making
most of the effort the Installer takes to detect and classify the disks
unnecessary.
I need to be able to have my own installer image to build a proof of
concept for that.
Greetings
Marc
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