Bug in bsdinstall (fs found where not present)

[Warren Block]

On Thu, 29 Aug 2013, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:

> On 08/29/13 14:04, Warren Block wrote:
>>> From a 9.2-PRERELEASE snapshot, go into the shell, create a GPT disk
>> layout with a bunch of partitions for filesystems and swap.  Exit the
>> shell and run the installer.
>>
>> Go through each partition setting a mount point.  Tell bsdinstall to
>> continue.  It reports that the / partition has a preexisting
>> filesystem (it does not, in fact; this disk had a mishmash of MBR and
>> NTFS on it).
>>
>> Tell bsdinstall to continue anyway.  It does, and then reports that it
>> can't mount /dev/ada0p2 on /mnt, presumably because, contrary to the
>> misleading and incorrect error message, there is no filesystem on there.
>>
>> The install fails, try again, entering all the mount points, and it
>> will fail the same.
>>
>> Short term solution: newfs the / partition, so there really is a
>> filesystem there for bsdinstall to detect and warn about.  Then it works.
>
> bsdinstall has no way to detect whether or not you already have UFS in a
> freebsd-ufs file system. It assumes, when not given contrary
> information, that a partition that exists is initialized. There does not
> seem to be a way around this. If you have any ideas, those would of
> course be helpful.

file(1) works well for detecting filesystems.

For that matter, what is bsdinstall doing now that makes it say there is 
a filesystem on a partition?  Maybe the message is misleading.