Re: partman, growlight, discoverable partitions, and fun

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

Hi Nick,

On Mon, Sep 27, 2021 at 06:25:03PM -0400, nick black wrote:
> Marc Haber left as an exercise for the reader:
> > But maybe an alternative? I find the partitioning step one of the most
> > error-prone and hard-to-use parts of non-trivial Debian installations.
> 
> so overall, i've got to say the feedback i heard here was a lot
> more positive than i was expecting, though there was a bit less
> than i had hoped for. but perhaps something that can be touched
> would see more interest?
> 
> given that no one seemed to reject the idea out of hand, i'm
> going to go ahead and rebase my work from 2012 (or more likely
> look at it once and redo it) in a Salsa fork of d-i, and make
> some installation media available. forgive me for likely only
> having x86 available at first. i'll try to have this done within
> a week or so, and put it up on my server. people can then give
> it a whirl.

I hadn't replied to it *yet*, but had fully intended to do so (just
didn't get around to that yet).

One thing that partman does is "support plug-ins", to allow for
configuring block devices before being able to partition them, where
needed. This can be useful for iSCSI, multipath, or (the one I care most
about) NBD. I wrote a "partman-nbd" a few years back to do just that:

https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/partman-nbd

This adds a few options to the partitioner menu to allow you to
add or remove an NBD device, and then if used makes sure the resulting
system is configured properly so that the NBD device(s) configured in
the installer will work after the system has been booted.

It would be nice if whatever component you write to replace partman has
support for things along these lines too. I don't mind having to rewrite
partman-nbd if that ends up being necessary (it's trivial enough), but
others might have different ideas about, say, partman-iscsi (just using
that as an example though, no idea about the details there).

Thanks,

-- 
     w@uter.{be,co.za}
wouter@{grep.be,fosdem.org,debian.org}