Rewrite Ubiquity's advanced partitioner for reliability and usability

Registered by Colin Watson

The use of gparted/qtparted in Dapper's live CD installer (Ubiquity) was expedient in terms of developer time, but it wasn't the long-term right answer. Using an external partition editor has many inherent problems, such as complex communication requirements with the rest of the installer, UI inconsistency between frontends, and behavioural inconsistency with the text-based installer and with autopartitioning. To replace this, we will write a simple Python frontend to partman using ubiquity's standard debconffilter framework, with relatively small PyGTK/PyQt shims. The UI will be designed from scratch with an eye to usability.

Whiteboard

scott 03jul: some minor review comments in the wiki, otherwise looks good
cjwatson 2006-07-04: review comments addressed
scott 04jul: perfect, approved
cjwatson 2006-09-04: Deferred for Edgy. There's just too much stuff in here to be able to get it done in time. I'll keep working on it and hopefully merge it ASAP for edgy+1.
cjwatson 2007-02-01: Switched on by default in Feisty Herd 3 (ubiquity --old-partitioner falls back to gparted/qtparted if need be). The disk bar isn't there yet, but I'm making decent progress on that now having ported some code over from gparted and hacking away at it to produce a prettier UI.
cjwatson 2007-02-28: No disk bar yet, but this actually isn't too bad-looking right now; beta available.
cjwatson 2007-05-14: Low-priority further work for gutsy.
cjwatson 2009-08-11: Closing this out as this was largely completed long ago, and further work was handled in other specifications and bugs.

(?)

Work Items

Dependency tree

* Blueprints in grey have been implemented.