Issues in 9.0 installer

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 10/06/11 05:14, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> I installed 9.0 in a VM in order to test some patches, and ran into
> three issues with the installer:
>
> 1) I selected "guided partitioning", then deleted the / and swap
>     partitions because I wanted more swap.  I did not delete the boot
>     partition, but the wizard complained about there being none.  The
>     first time, I answered yes to creating one, and ended up with two
>     boot partitions, so I deleted and recreated everything, and got the
>     same message again.  This time I ignored it, and the install went
>     just fine; bsdinstall apparently found my boot partition and wrote
>     the boot loader to it.

This is something that's hard to do right, since the "freebsd-boot" 
partition may have the wrong bootcode or may even have been from another 
OS (Linux and OS X use the same partition type as we do for this on APM, 
for instance). A fix is to have it check if there is an uncommitted one 
that the installer has just made, but I haven't had time to make that 
patch yet.

> 2) When I recreated the boot partition, I noticed that bsdinstall does
>     not accept "64 kB" as a valid partition size.  I had to type "64KB".

Weird -- looks like a bug in expand_number(3), and should probably be 
fixed there.

> 3) I had the installer create a user for me, but it did not create my
>     home directory, nor even /home.

This was a brief regression in pw(8) that unfortunately made it into 
BETA1 -- it's been fixed since.

> Note that this is from BETA1 - I couldn't find a BETA3 iso online, but
> bz had a BETA1 iso on his laptop.  I apologize if these issues have
> already been found and fixed.
>
> DES

Thanks for your comments!
-Nathan