Ubiquity partitioner needs to be made clearer

Colin Watson cjwatson at ubuntu.com
Mon Feb 4 14:34:15 GMT 2008


On Sat, Feb 02, 2008 at 06:56:14PM -0800, AA Boy wrote:
> Hi, I posted on Ubuntu's forum's idea pool (see this
> topic<http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=671770>)
> about Ubiquity's partitioner needing to be made clearer. I was thinking
> maybe the "use entire disk" part could have a warning which said it would
> erase all the data on the disk, in bold.

That warning exists, just later on. It doesn't erase your disk until it
gets to the final page, which says:

 WARNING: This will destroy all data on any partitions you have
 removed as well as on the partitions that are going to be formatted.

If people don't read one warning, I honestly have trouble seeing why
they're going to read another. Eventually, if you fill things up with
more and more warnings, the effect is that people skip over them all ...

> Also, this is just my opinion, but why isn't GParted included as the
> manual partitioner anymore in Ubiquity? I find myself having to open
> GParted to partition my disks before I start the install because the
> manual partitioner is more confusing than it.

GParted suffered from many other very serious problems, particularly
when embedded inside the installer. You may have been lucky enough not
to run into them, but they were certainly there, and extremely hard to
fix without a complete rewrite. The use of GParted in Ubiquity was only
ever intended as a temporary stopgap.

Please make sure that bugs are filed about any *specific* issues with
Ubiquity's partitioner (preferably specific suggestions for improvement,
rather than "please switch back to GParted").

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]



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