A couple of rants about Launchpad

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 09:31:41PM +0800, Chan Chung Hang Christopher wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote:
> > I don't remember the details, so can't comment on them specifically. We
> > spend the last couple of weeks of a release cycle doing very little else
> > but testing, and we try very hard to make sure that problems encountered
> > during testing are dealt with where it's at all possible to do so
> > (tracking them via http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/ and the iso-testing tag on
> > bugs). Of course, it does happen that problems slip through that affect
> > only a subset of people; sometimes they actually didn't come up during
> > testing at all, and sometimes they did but we just weren't able to fix
> > them in time and had to resort to workarounds to minimise their effects.
> >
> > When this sort of thing hits you, of course it's natural to say "oh,
> > those Ubuntu folks, they couldn't be bothered to test and fix things". I
> > don't blame you for that. I'm simply here to say that that is not the
> > way it works. We make frequent calls for more involvement in pre-release
> > testing so that it isn't just a small number of regular testers
> > involved.
> 
> I don't remember the details either. What I do remember is being told on 
> the list that the blasted problem package was a gnome thing and that 
> that particular package had no maintainer. So it is not Ubuntu 
> specific...just that the package got bundled alone with the rest of 
> gnome into the release. Which really is not on and gives the impression 
> that Ubuntu cannot deliver on quality whatever the reason maybe.

It may be worth distinguishing between what somebody tells you on a
mailing list and what is actually the case. Anything of sufficient
priority that manifests in Ubuntu becomes our problem whether we were
previously working on it or not. (Of course this may not magically
produce somebody to work on it, hence "sufficient priority".)

> > I won't take responsibility for every single mailing list post being
> > answered correctly, but you should have been pointed to the installation
> > guide (https://help.ubuntu.com/8.10/installation-guide/i386/) whose
> > preseeding appendix does document how to do LVM or RAID partitioning.
> > That said, LVM *and* RAID partitioning (i.e. LVM on top of RAID) is a
> > common request that the automatic partitioning software can't quite
> > handle yet. I'm getting hammered on this from a number of directions, so
> > there's likely to be work on this for 9.10.
> 
> Oh...so lvm on raid is still a no-no. d-i leaves a lot to be 
> desired...but if it is possible to use d-i manually to set raid on 
> lvm...what needs doing to make it work automatically?

Defining a recipe format for it (there's no real nesting in partition
recipes at the moment, which makes things like this a little more
difficult than they ought to be), and implementing that in
partman-auto-raid. Or possibly just some kind of reordering so that you
can run normal LVM autopartitioning after automatic RAID partitioning.

d-i's automatic partitioner follows different code paths from the manual
partitioner, partly for implementation reasons and partly because the
requirements tend to be substantially different in some ways.

> Also, when you say there will be work on it for 9.10...are you
> referring to d-i or the ubuntu installer?

I work on both; I think it's unlikely that I'd want to put a feature
such as this into Ubuntu and not Debian.

> > For those who find that preseeding is too complicated, Kickstart
> > compatibility is available
> > (https://help.ubuntu.com/8.10/installation-guide/i386/automatic-install.html).
> > It isn't as flexible in various areas, but that's OK since it provides
> > an escape hatch so that you can mix and match Kickstart and preseeding.
> 
> will d-i grok kickstart disk partitioning?

Yes, with some restrictions. See the installation guide link I just
posted which answers your question.

> if using kickstart files means that one still needs to be at the
> console...it ain't worth it.

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]