> If it would be better to put these in a PR, or to put each one in a
> separate PR, I'd be happy to do that.

If you deceide they warrant PRs, make them separate - so that the
PRs can be closed when an issue is fixed.

> - The partitioning tool seems semi-broken, in that it refuses to allow
>   partitions to overlap (except for overlap with c).  I had a disk
>   pre-partitioned roughly thus:
> 
>     aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa     dddddddddddbbbbbbbbbb
>                                   eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
> 
>   and perhaps I just told it the wrong thing, but it whined about d and
>   e overlapping - I knew they overlapped and I wanted it that way.  I'm
>   quite sure I set both d and e to no-mount.

sysinst doesn't want it that way - it is usually a bug waiting to happen

> - Despite having d and e both set to no-mount and no-newfs, and d set
>   to size=0 offset=0 (this last because of the previous issue),
>   something tried to do some command - fsck, I think - on the d
>   partition (and of course it failed).  For some reason this didn't
>   repeat when I retried; I don't understand why not.

Did you do an 'update' or an 'install' ?
The former will read /etc/fstab from the existing fs and try to mount
everything.  It probably ought to display the entries and their 'last
mounted on' fields (in knowable) and force you to enable them is the
'last mounted' mismatches.

> - When doing unmounted-FS installation, the installer prompts for a
>   base directory and a path.  It would help if it gave some indication
>   what it means by these; I couldn't figure out what the base directory
>   was supposed to be until I saw the pathnames it was trying to use, in
>   error messages.

The split is vital for NFS, and helps typing in other cases.
If you can think of better names for the menu labels they can be changed.

> - Related to the previous one, it would help if I could set the base
>   directory to a zero-length string.  I had to set the base directory
>   to . to get it to DTRT.

The input routines used by sysinst don't allow you specify an empty
buffer - since the empty string => use the default.
Maybe I could change that in the cases when the default is displayed
in the input area (as happens for these filesnames).

> - When an unmounted-FS install fails, it would be nice if it gave me
>   the option of re-entering the device and path data, instead of just
>   Abort, Retry, Ignore.

Yes - I started trying to redesign the 'retry' loops sometime in April!
It all got bogged down with the way ftp installs work - I might need
to change them to do ftp-install-ftp-install...

The plan was to remove some of the loops that are there, but expand
so that you go back to the 'where do you want to install from' menu
and continue installing pulling the sets from somewhere else.

>   It would also help if some of the setup on the
>   path I had to take to retry remembered what I'd selected before (in
>   particular, I think the partitioning screen should remember my
>   no-mount settings).

You have a coding stick :-)

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk