setup-storage and preserving partitions

[Michael Tautschnig]

> We have been using FAI for several years, but have just started to try
> disk partitioning with setup-storage.  Our standard disk configuration
> uses 2 primary partitions and 3 logical partitions.  We would like
> to preserve the *size* of all partitions and preserve the *contents*
> of only the last two logical partitions.  Here is how we did this
> with setup_harddisks:
> 
> disk_config sda
> primary  /       preserve1   defaults,errors=remount-ro       ; -j ext3 format
> primary  swap    preserve2   sw                               ; format
> logical  /var    preserve5   defaults,errors=remount-ro       ; -j ext3 format
> logical  /home   preserve6   defaults,nosuid,nodev,errors=remount-ro  ; ext3
> logical  /d1     preserve7   defaults,nosuid,nodev,errors=remount-ro  ; ext3
> 
> I have not been able to find the proper syntax to use with setup-storage
> to achieve this same result.  I think it should look something like the
> following, but I'm not sure what to put in the "size" column:
> 
> disk_config sda disklabel:msdos bootable:1 preserve_always:6,7
> primary  /      ??   ext3  defaults,errors=remount-ro    createopts="-j"
> primary  swap   ??   swap  sw
> logical  /var   ??   ext3  defaults,errors=remount-ro    createopts="-j"
> logical  /home  ??   ext3  defaults,nosuid,nodev,errors=remount-ro
> logical  /d1    ??   ext3  defaults,nosuid,nodev,errors=remount-ro
> 
> (Note that the partition sizes may vary from machine to machine.)
> 
> Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.  Thank you.
> 

I think I never thought of such a use case :-) - whatever the reasons may be
that you are so keen on preserving sizes, as apparently nobody requested
"preserve the size only" before, that feature is indeed missing. For partitions
6 and 7 you can either say preserve6, preserve7 or just put some arbitrary size
in there. For the others, however, we'll need a new option :-(

For the moment, the only workaround I can see is a hook that does the formatting
after setup-storage has run, but that shall not be the long-term solution.

The easiest approach would be some additional option preserve_size, but I'm not
sure whether this is the best thing to do. Could you maybe give me a brief
account of your rationale behind preserving the size only to gain a better
understanding?

Thanks a lot,
Michael

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