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

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

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.

>>>> 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.

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

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.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.