The one thing I don't understand about this bug is that Ted has said
(e.g. in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/106209/comments/20) that
Ubuntu trashes swap UUIDs by running mkswap, but as far as I know this
isn't true any more. Since Ubuntu 7.04, we don't just run mkswap; we
extract the old UUID with dd, run mkswap, and reinsert the old UUID
again. (The reason we run mkswap at all is that it turns out to be a lot
faster than asking libparted to check whether the swap partition is
valid.)

If we discount swap as a red herring - or at the very least a bug that's
been fixed for some time, even if it still hangs around due to 6.06 and
6.10 - then there are two parts to this bug:

  1) Some component of partman, probably partman-target, should check
before formatting whether any of the partitions you're formatting are
referred to by /etc/fstab in any of the other filesystems on the system,
and issue a warning that doing this will confuse those other
installations. The suggestion to add an option to save the UUID and put
it back after formatting is intriguing, though of course we can only do
this for sure if we're still using the same filesystem.

  2) Arguably, partman-auto should not automatically mount filesystems
that contain (say) /etc/fstab. I'm a little more sceptical about this,
because I think we're going to be caught between a rock and a hard
place. Let's say you're migrating from Red Hat to Ubuntu, and your Red
Hat installation doesn't have a separate /home. In that case, it's
convenient to be able to get at /home anyway, and certainly it feels
inconsistent to have /home automounted only if it's on a separate
partition. (Jerry may be happy to mount it by hand, but we added the
automounting precisely because not everyone knew how to do that.) That
said, I take Ted's point that there's no way to specify the difference
between something that's in fstab for convenience and something that's
there out of necessity, short perhaps of setting fs_passno to 0.

However ... the desktop has got better since we did all this
automounting stuff originally. Nowadays you can go to Places ->
Computer, double-click on the filesystem you want to use, enter your
sudo password, et voilĂ . That wasn't the case in 5.10 when this was
first implemented. Thus, perhaps it's no longer worth it, and I'm moving
this bug over to partman-auto and targetting it to Hardy for further
consideration.

If you still want the automounting done in the installer, then speak now
or forever hold your peace ...

** Changed in: partman-auto (Ubuntu)
Sourcepackagename: None => partman-auto
   Importance: Undecided => High

-- 
fsck Unable to resolve UUID
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/106209
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