replacing the Startup Disk Creator

[Nio Wiklund]

Den 2015-09-17 kl. 17:47, skrev Marc Deslauriers:
> On 2015-09-17 11:26 AM, Nio Wiklund wrote:
>> Den 2015-09-17 kl. 16:35, skrev Marc Deslauriers:
>>> Hi!
>>>
>>> On 2015-09-17 10:24 AM, Nio Wiklund wrote:
>>>> Hi subscribers to the ubuntu-quality mailing list,
>> ,,,
>>
>>> Care to elaborate what the many bugs are? I use it every single day for testing
>>> security updates on real hardware and since bug 1279987 got fixed it's been
>>> working great for me.
>>>
>>>>
>> ...
>>
>>> Ideally it would also have both gtk and kde frontends, like usb-creator
>>> currently has.
>>>
>>> Marc.
>>
>> Hi Marc,
>>
>> Elaborating on bugs and strange behaviour:
>>
>> kansasnoob:
>>
>> 1. Aside from SDC being badly borked one of the most annoying design
>> flaws has always been the 10 minute timeout for installing the
>> bootloader. I'm sure I'm not the only one that multi-tasks constantly,
>> and not just at the desk. Watching and waiting for SDC to ask if you
>> want to install the bootloader is about like watching paint dry
>> ............... but if you get distracted for more than 10 minutes after
>> SDC asks about bootloader installation you have to start all over again
> 
> That's a one-line fix. Is there a bug opened for that issue?
> 
>>
>> 2. Bug numbers
>>
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/usb-creator/+bug/1325801
>>
>> But the proposed "fix" resulted in this:
>>
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/usb-creator/+bug/1446646
>>
>> My final comment on that bug was here:
>>
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/usb-creator/+bug/1325801/comments/146
>>
>> S-D-C is borked - it's useless to create live USB's of either older or
>> newer versions of Ubuntu than the version you're running S-D-C on. And
>> the proposed fix that made it into Vivid and got backported into Utopic
>> resulted in S-D-C being able to only produce live USB's of the same
>> architecture.
> 
> Bug 1325801 is being actively worked on.
> 
> Interesting, I can't reproduce bug 1446646. I can create both amd64 and i386
> bootable usb disks for trusty and vivid on my vivid amd64 laptop.
> 
> Is there something special I need to do to reproduce your issue?
> 
> 
>>
>> mc4man:
>>
>> s-d-c worked ok here on 14.04.1 but fails now on installing bootloader
>> with 14.04.2/3. s-d-c does currently work in 15.10 (trying to create
>> 14.04.3 image)
>>
>> sudodus - alias me, Nio:
>>
>> There is also a bug that makes it impossible to 'erase a disk'. I don't
>> know if it has a bug number, but it is there at least in some of the
>> current versions.
> 
> That's probably a udisks issue. It would help to actually have a bug filed for it.
> 
>>
>> You see, there are too many bugs, that minor bug like the 'erase a disk'
>> was not even reported. Once we thought it would be squashed when a bug
> 
> You've listed 4 bugs, two of which weren't even reported. I don't think that's
> too many to simply fix.
> 
>> was being debugged, but it turned out to be independent of that bug, and
>> I don't know of any bug report directed against it.
>>
>> -o-
>>
>> Concerning front-ends, they can be more or less independent of gtk and kde.
>>
>> mkusb uses bash + zenity + pv, which are available without importing
>> heavy stacks of gtk or kde packages.
> 
> I do hope you're not proposing to replace s-d-c with a bash script that needs
> admin privileges and doesn't use udisks or policykit. That would be a non-starter.
> 
>>
>> Disks belongs to gnome, I don't know if there is any corresponding
>> built-in cloning tool in kde (not counting cp and dd).
>>
>> I don't know about Unetbootin and Multisystem and the other tools, how
>> many packages they will bring. But we can find out.
>>
>> Unetbootin has versions for Windows and Mac OS too, which is an advantage.
>>
>> Best regards
>> Nio
>>
> 
> Marc.
> 

Hi again Marc,

I will forward your comments and tips to the persons at the Ubuntu
Forums who reported the bugs and bad features :-)

More than four years has passed with severe bugs, that make the SDC fail
in many cases. I think you have had enough chances to fix it, and it
would be better to use another tool instead. That way you can spend your
time improving other things.

I can only suggest a change, and supply information and opinion about
the alternative tools. If a majority of the deciding forum does not want
to replace the SDC, that's it. We can continue to help people at the
Ubuntu Forums to install other tools in order to make USB pendrives
bootable with Ubuntu.

Best regards
Nio