Re: Wedges & sysinst (Was: Wedges enabled on -current)

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Sat, 23 Aug 2014 14:15:14 +0200
    From:        Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <20140823121514.GC21635%mail.duskware.de@localhost>

  | Sysinst allows creating gpt partitions already,

I had never seen any sign of that, but I knew that could have been
just from a lack of observation (expecting the way sysinst would work
and just going through the motions on auto-pilot).  But today I got
a chance to do some tests, and I still haven't see any sign of that
(operationally - I can see what looks to be code to attempt it in the
sysinst sources).

I cannot get any mention of gpt partitioning to appear anywhere - using
an amd64 xen domU install kernel 7.99.1 (from a day or two ago).

Where should I be seeing it?

  | but there are "issues" to be fixed (probably lots of them),

One obvious one I see is that the code does ...

           "sh -c 'gpt show %s |grep -e Pri\\ GPT\\ table'", dev);

to see if there's already a GPT label ... but that cannot work (in this
setup anyway) as there's no grep command to run on the mini-root (md0a
in the install kernel).   Maybe other install kernel images have one, but
not the one I was using (it does have grep() defined as a function using
sed in /.profile but that's useless for this purpose, even if it were found,
as sed doesn't set its exit code based upon whether the pattern is found or
not the way grep does.)

It would be useful if the gpt command either had a subcommand to test
(and return an exit code) to see whether there's already a GPT label,
or if the exit code of gpt show could be used for that purpose (at the
minute, assuming correct usage, it always seems to exit(0), whether there's
a GPT label or not.)  Then the grep looking for a string, which could in
theory change for almost any reason, wouldn't be needed.

That is not the underlying cause of my not seeing any gpt related menu
entries however, I was installing to a virgin disk partition, it had no
labels of any kind on it (no mbr, no disklabel, no gpt) so whether that
command failed for lack of grep, or for lack of a GPT table, really
makes no difference (if it succeeded, as I read the code, it should have
been forcing GPT partitioning, and that certainly didn't happen.)

I tried creating a GPT table by hand (/sbin/gpt is in the root) which
worked, but made no difference at all to sysinst.

  | and right now in -current it does not deal well with the wedge
  | autodetection.

Yes, I understand that issue (I think) - that's a problem for mbr/disklabel
based installs, right? - I wanted to install into a gpt partitioned drive,
which if sysinst supports it at all, would have to be able to use wedges.
But I didn't get that far...

kre