On 08/05/11 20:04, Garrett Cooper wrote:
On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 3:35 PM, Kevin Oberman<kob6...@gmail.com> wrote:
I have installed 9-Beta1 using the new installation tool and I am
generally happy with it.
The new dialog cause me to need a few more key-strokes because I was
so used to the
old behavior, but it really is more intuitive and I would not want to
see the old behavior
restored. I'll get used to it soon.
I do have a couple of issues with the new installation tool, though.
1. After completing the partition design I am presented with the
option to "Save" the
partitions. It is not at all cleared that "Save" actually creates the
partitions and newfses
the file systems. I suggest changing "Save" to "Commit" or Execute".
These are far
clearer and more frightening. "Save" sounds too safe, not like you are
about to update
basic disk structure and may be about to make any data on the disk unusable.
2. I was installing 9 into an existing set of partitions. (I
understand that this is NOT
typical.) First the system asks me about adding a partition. Oops! I
selected the only
option that was not clearly wrong, "Cancel". I was not at all sure
that it was what I
wanted, but it was. I have no idea how to improve this and it's
probably not worth
spending much time think about it. But the next step was confusing.
I selected each of the existing partitions that I was going to use and
selected modify to
enter the name of the partition (/, /var, /usr, /tmp). I then quit and
selected the not
scarey "Save". I proceeded, but thought the "Save" was rather fast.
Then the install failed
because the partitions were already populated. I ended up re-booting
and then going
through each partition and deleting it and then selecting the slice
and creating it again.
While not a big deal, it seemed like the Modify to name the partitions
should have
triggered the newfs that was not done.
I think my first point is pretty important. The second is far less so.
The install went pretty well and I am generally very pleased with the
new installer. It's
certainly an improvement over the old one! Thanks to the folks who worked on it.
One of the things that's still a problem as well (since you're talking
about it here) is that the partition editor assumes that all
partitions are properly formatted, etc, when specifying just a
mountpoint. One needs to trash the MBR / GPT metadata and start over
from the beginning. GPT partitions have issues too with incomplete
partition schemes (i.e. user deletes a GPT partition out of an
existing setup, etc) because unfortunately the "boot" partition gets
created improperly the 2nd+ time around and/or gets created multiple
times for some whacky reason (I don't know why this happened, but it
did!).
I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. Whenever you add a /
partition on a partitioning scheme that requires a boot partition (APM,
GPT on some platforms), the installer asks you if you want to add a boot
partition. The auto-partitioner does this automatically. It does not
reuse any existing boot partition for two reasons:
- It has no way to know the other boot partition was correctly set up
and so would need to reinitialize it.
- There is no guarantee that it is even related to FreeBSD. On APM
disks, we share a boot partition type with OS X and Linux.
The safest thing to do is to make a new one, and let the user delete any
extraneous old ones, just as they probably have deleted old extraneous /
partitions.
-Nathan
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