On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 09:29:43AM +0200, Pascal Hambourg wrote:
> On 18/07/2025 at 13:14, Andrew Sayers wrote:
> >
> > I've updated partman's wiki page with information
> > I couldn't find in the official documentation:
> >
> > https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Partman
> >
> > `$bios_boot{ }` appears to be an old option, and I can't
> > find any evidence `$gptonly{ }` was ever actually implemented.
>
> I am quite new to partman-auto but have never seen any of these.
> Do you have any evidence that '$bios_boot{ }' was ever implemented ?
I haven't found any reference to it in the source code,
but bug #491376 comment #47 says:
The correct approach here, I think, is to use a partman method instead.
That ensures that a partition can contain a filesystem or a BIOS boot
area, but not both. This also makes preseeding a lot easier - we don't
need a special-cased $bios_boot{ } internal specifier any more, but can
just set the method in the natural way.
... so it seems to have existed back in 2009. More importantly, I've found
both `$bios_boot{ }` and `$gptonly{ }` recommended around the Internet,
but never found a definitive statement about what they're supposedly about.
I wouldn't mind these being added to the official documentation, but I went to
the wiki first because that seems like the more obvious place for documentation
that's basically just debunking urban legends.
> 'method{ biosgrub }' is just a regular specifier (creates an arbitrary file
> in the partition directory) among many others, why specifically mention it ?
`partman-auto-recipe.txt` mentions the following:
method{ format } - described in that file
method{ swap } - described in passing
method{ keep } - described in passing
method{ lvm } - seems to make sense in context
method{ newworld } - seems to make sense in context
method{ efi } - seems to make sense in context
`method{ biosgrub }` is worth knowing about, but not mentioned there.
If there are others missing, they should be documented too :)
> > If you would rather not mention that sort of thing in
> > partman-auto-recipe.txt, could you link to the wiki page instead?
> > That should let users find the page, but understand it's less official.
>
> I opened a merge request against debian-installer to update
> partman-auto-recipe.txt with missing descriptions and some clarifications:
> <https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/debian-installer/-/merge_requests/66>
That looks much better! I'll register for a Salsa account and try to
participate in the actual MR discussion, but here are some specific nitpicks:
> Stripped if an existing partition is reused.
I think this means the setting will be ignored, not that the partition
will be zeroed. If so, maybe s/stripped/ignored/?
> in order to preserve its contents.
Consider adding: multiple space-separated options supported since partman-auto
170
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=491376#47
