bin/161926: bsdinstall(8): disk layout trouble

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 10/24/11 03:56, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> In message<4EA47456.7090008 at freebsd.org>, Nathan Whitehorn writes:
>> On 10/23/11 13:15, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>> There's not actually too much need for them, and so they never seemed
>> pressing. Pressing control-C/choosing "cancel"/etc. will either skip
>> steps that can be returned to later (post-extraction) or return to the
>> beginning of the installation, which is where you already were,
> Let me just note that neither the overall structure nor where I would
> end up by pressing Ctrl-C was not even remotely obvious to this
> particular user.

Well, that can probably be improved. Robert Bonomi's suggestion was very 
good as well, and I'll see what can be done there. There are a few 
related things, as well.

>>>>> Active partition is the last one created ?
>>>>> There is no place I can see it ?
>>>>> There is no place I can change it ?
>>>> Active partition is the last bootable (e.g. freebsd) partition you
>>>> created, yes.
>>> That is *totally* bogus, at the very least, make it the first one.
>> The UI problem is actually hard, and the correct solution without a UI
>> solution is non-obvious. The usual use case, where only one MBR
>> partition of type freebsd is added, works perfectly well. I'll try to
>> find a reasonable solution to this, but have very little time at the
>> moment -- patches would be much appreciated.
> The fact that is is hard to do right, seems an incredibly lousy
> excuse for doing something totally counter-intutive.

Well, I didn't find it counterintuitive, but it is a lousy excuse.

> Systems with more than one MBR partition are quite common in the
> wild in my experience.

But more than one FreeBSD MBR partition, with a label inside it?

> How about you set the active flag on whatever parition contains the
> / filesystem as part of final cleanup ?
>
> I'm not going to be sending patches:  I solved this problem once
> according to the priorities at the time, you get to solve it this
> time :-)
>
> My input should simply count as a single old grumbling fart, and
> if you think he is totally out of touch, you get to ignore him.
>
Well, you're a grumbling old fart who's usually right. The behavior 
right now is that any sub-partitioning that you do in the installer gets 
marked active. It's a little more complicated to turn the install 
bootcode flag on only if a sub-partition is root, but not much, so that 
sounds like a good solution.
-Nathan