(Bug?): nummeration for preserved partions

Michael Tautschnig mt at debian.org
Sat Dec 4 18:44:06 CET 2010


Hi,

> our disk_config looks like
> 
> disk_config disk1 preserve_reinstall:X bootable:1
> 
> primary    /boot     150   ext3    rw,noatime
> logical    swap      2000  swap    rw
> logical    /         400   ext3    rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro
> logical    /usr      15000 ext3    rw,noatime
> logical    /var      5000  ext3    rw,noatime
> logical    /var/tmp  4000  ext3    rw,noatime
> primary    /local    0-    ext3    rw
> 
> and we want to preserve /local. So I would assume replacing X with 7, but this is mistake, because /local becomes /dev/sda3 in the installation (and sda7 is preserved).
> 
> It would be nice, if this issue could be documented in the man-page of setup-storage, or better: Preserve the 7th entry in the list, instead of the 7th partition.
> 

I tried to improve the corresponding documentation:

       option ::= /* empty */
                  | preserve_always:([[:digit:]]+(,[[:digit:]]+)*|all)
                  /* preserve partitions -- always; the numbers refer to partition
                  numbers, i.e., preserve_always:5 for /dev/hda refers to /dev/hda5,
                  which may not necessarily be the 5th line of the configuration */
                  | preserve_reinstall:([[:digit:]]+(,[[:digit:]]+)*|all)
                  /* preserve partitions -- unless the system is installed for the
                  first time. See preserve_always above for the semantics of numbers
                  used for referring to partitions. */

Does that sufficiently clarify documentation? I concur that this was not
properly documented; in fact, it was not documented at all. I would, however,
prefer not to change the semantics of these numbers as that might break existing
setups in unexpected (and very dangerous) ways. Sure, the existing code might
already have corrupted one of your systems, but changing the behaviour would
actually break it again :-/

Hope this helps,
Michael

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