aims team mailing list archive

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My profound apologies for our poor and slow response to this bug.  It's
clear that we need to do much better.  I think my colleagues who've
looked at this so far have focused on the detail of individual failures,
which is an understandable response, but this bug needs us to step a bit
further back than that.  I've tried to analyse as many of the specific
examples given here as I could, but this bug is very long and that
length has itself I think deterred some developers from responding to it
promptly; from here on in I'd appreciate it if any responses necessary
could be kept short and to the point, so that we don't get further
bogged down.

The root cause of this is essentially an overoptimistic design that
assumes that we can always accurately detect the set of operating
systems installed on the system.  I can see why the designers of the
current automatic partitioning page wanted that - it's obviously a
desirable feature to have - but it is vital that we defend in depth
against it being wrong.  While we certainly should try to fix OS
detection errors, a more fundamental principle needs to be that we do
not mislead users into erasing valuable data because we made an OS
detection error.  OS detection must be treated as a useful advisory
tool, and not something whose failure can result in the involuntary
erasure of user data.

I generally agree with Clement Lefebvre (comment #38) and Chris
Bainbridge (comment #80) that the problem lies in the descriptions
selected for various basic automatic partitioning options; I'm not quite
using their patches verbatim, but I'm taking a fairly similar approach.
The "use_device" option must *never* be described in any terms that do
not make it clear that it erases the disk.  Furthermore, even if we
believe that only Ubuntu is installed, we must offer separate "erase
Ubuntu and reinstall" and "erase disk and install Ubuntu" options,
because we might be wrong.

Chris Bainbridge has several good points in their rewording of the
automatic partitioning options.  However, it's critical that we be able
to apply this patch to 14.04 point releases as smoothly as possible, and
I don't want to run into translation delays (as it's important that non-
English-speakers be able to understand these warnings too).  The current
text for ubiquity/partitioner/multiple_os_format is clear enough, I
think ("Erase disk and install Ubuntu"; "Warning: This will delete all
your programs, documents, photos, music, and any other files in all
operating systems"), so I'm simply arranging never to use any other text
to describe the "use_device" option.  That saves having to worry about
translation updates here.

I'm also inclined to agree at this point that a confirmation option is
probably desirable.  Again, I can absolutely see why the design ended up
here, as it certainly gives us an installer with cleaner lines, but it
seems cavalier to fail to be absolutely clear what's about to be done.
Resurrecting the old confirmation page in its entirety would be pretty
difficult at this point, and it had its own issues anyway, but we can
probably at least manage a simple confirmation dialog.  I'll look into
that.

** No longer affects: ubuntu-livecd-image (Ubuntu)

** No longer affects: ubuntu-livecd-image (Ubuntu Trusty)

** Changed in: ubiquity (Ubuntu)
       Status: Confirmed => In Progress

** Changed in: ubiquity (Ubuntu)
    Milestone: ubuntu-14.04 => ubuntu-14.10

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1265192

Title:
  Install/reinstall wipes out all/other partitions

Status in elementary OS:
  Triaged
Status in “ubiquity” package in Ubuntu:
  In Progress
Status in “ubiquity” source package in Trusty:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Brand new Samsung laptop with UEFI. I had installed 13.04 Ubuntu but on reboot I never saw the 'grub' style menu. It just kept going into Windows 8.1.  So I got the 13.10 version (64 bit) and choose "Reinstall Ubuntu" (That may not be the exact text)
  It removed all the partiions including the recovery partitions. I do have a backup for the windows install, but I was very surprised that this happened.
  On a positive note I now have Ububtu up and running on my machine. 
  This is not my first time with Ubuntu. I have installed Ubuntu alongside WinXp, Vista and Windows 7. I've used Ubuntu desktop for over 6 years.
  If you would like me to try something to replicate this. .. I could shrink my existing partion make another one - reinstall and see if it whacks that one. I can do this now .. I'm still moving into this laptop so starting over is not so bad.

  Steve Devine

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