replacing the Startup Disk Creator

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre]

Le 2015-09-17 12:17, Nio Wiklund a écrit :
[...]
> 
> I did not know about it, but you just showed me a bug report about the
> 'Erase disk' problem.
> 
> Make Startup Disk fails to wipe disk, Bug #1485417 (and there are more
> similar bug reports in the long list).
> 

This is indeed some issues with udisks failing do to things we ask it
to, for various reasons. We're trying to fix this, but the issues are
not all obvious or are hard to reproduce reliably.

Seems at least part of it is due to how images get written when done
with dd.


> I have been helping people at the Ubuntu Forums for some years now, and
> I have seen so many problems related to the SDC. If you know exactly
> what it can do, and you keep doing that, it works, but beginners and
> average users don't know and have big problems. We have to recommend
> other tools instead. It is really an awkward situation, when Ubuntu's
> own tool does not work for beginners and average users.

I don't have the same experience as you do. I keep recommending
usb-creator too, and it works quite well for the majority of people. The
thing with helping on forums is you're most likely to see only the "bad"
side of things: people will discuss issues because they run into them,
but (while I don't want to diminish the importance of what they are
facing) they're often dealing with corner cases.

> I don't think all these bug reports are written for fun. I think the
> vast majority of them are written by people who are concerned and want
> to help by reporting bugs about real problems. And several of them are new.
> 

But several of them are also duplicates of the same issue with udisks --
failing to erase the disk because reasons.

> A big problem with the SDC is that new and severe bugs appear with new
> versions of Ubuntu. I think that the method used and maybe also the

That simply isn't true. There are relatively few issues in total with
usb-creator if you look at the bug reports carefully enough.

 - erasing the disks is brittle.
 - creating amd64 images from i386 breaks.

While I agree the first tends to be a recurring issue (we keep fixing it
and it breaks again later), and the second one we introduced as an
unexpected side-effect of fixing another bug, that's hardly "a lot".

> programming language and programming style makes it too sensitive. The
> SDC has needed several major bugfixes and I'm afraid it will continue to

It's written in python. Relatively simple python at that too, otherwise
my little brain would likely have a lot of trouble dealing with it ;)

I feel it's quite approachable, the issue only being that due to
wrapping other things, it's subject to it's dependencies breaking in fun
ways.

For example, since UEFI, we've effectively doubled the number of issues
you could have related to formatting and partitioning -- you need to
deal with the usual MBR partitioning, but you also need to deal with GPT
(which seems to be what's causing issues now)

> need major bugfixes with new versions. It has been too buggy for general
> use after 10.10, according to the Ubuntu member 'ventrical' (at the
> Ubuntu Forums).

We all have different views on it and varying use cases that don't tend
to intersect. I use it regularly without too many problems (but like
Marc, mostly on amd64), others may see a different side of it. It
doesn't mean that it should be thrown away.

The jist of it is: when you notice an issue, please file a bug. I for
one don't spend *any* time on forums since I just don't have any time
for it -- I can't know what people are reporting as issues there, and we
need to bugs to be open in Launchpad anyway to be able to deal with them
efficiently.

For the time being, like I've expressed elsewhere, there seems to be no
other project with is as reliable, as easy to use, and as easily
maintainable.

-- 
Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <mathieu-tl at ubuntu.com>
Freenode: cyphermox, Jabber: mathieu.tl at gmail.com
4096R/DC95CA5A 36E2 CF22 B077 FEFE 725C  80D3 C7DA A946 DC95 CA5A

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