9-beta1 installer - partition editor

[Ivan Voras]

On 31 August 2011 15:35, Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 08/31/11 08:28, Ivan Voras wrote:

>> If it is as you say, then the dialog where I entered "/" and "/srv"
>> should definitely NOT have that field on it.
>
> Well, no. It only applies to bsdlabel containers. For instance, were I to
> want to mount an ext2 or fat32 partition directly under MBR, which the
> installer can do (and create, in the case of fat32), the mountpoint field is
> very important. What we *can* do is add a check that rejects mountpoints for
> partitions of type "freebsd". I'll see if I can code that up; it's too late
> for BETA2, however.

As you probably know, nothing precludes users to create UFS (or any
other file system) directly under the MBR partition or the disk
itself, so in fact what I showed in the screenshots should have been a
valid operation.

I think the dialogs are confusing, especially for users not used to
the FreeBSD way of doing things. How about these *minimal* changes to
the partition editor:

1) Before the partition editor starts, show an informational dialog
box describing in short (one screen, no scrolling) that they can
choose to either use a "normal" partitioning scheme like Linux,
Windows and others and just create simple partitions or they can go
the weird BSD way and create nested partitions (i.e. disklabels under
a MBR partition).

2) Have a helpful message / line in the partition editor saying that
if a "freebsd"-type partition is created without a mountpoint
specified, the editor will allow creating second-level bsdlabel under
them.

I am very much trying to emphasize that any assumption that users will
know these two pieces of information before they use the installer
will only cause them to fill the mailing lists with bug reports such
as mine or worse - just silently give up.