Re: 5.1 installer issue

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>> When partitioning the disk [on i386], I specifically switched the
>> input unit to sectors and specified an exact sector count.  But
>> [...] the size I specified has been...well, not quite ignored [...],
>> but it certainly hasn't been obeyed, even though the previous
>> display showed exactly what I entered.
> There is code to round to 'cylinder' and/or 64MB.
> I can't remember whether it can overridden.

There wasn't any way which was obvious to me.  Perhaps I just missed
something; wouldn't be the first time....

> It also may, or may not! apply to the mbr editor or the disklabel
> one.

This was the disklabel editor.  I told the installer to use the whole
disk and that was it for the MBR partitioning.

>> I discovered that the partition editor provided at that point has no
>> way to say "change the size but leave the end fixed, moving the
>> start instead"....
> Hmmm.... when I rewrote it all I didn't think of that one!

For that matter, it also doesn't/didn't have "change the end but leave
the start fixed, updating the size", which would have been convenient
at a different point.  A way to refer to locations derived from other
partitions (as in, "put the end of partition X at the beginning of
partition Y", rather than having to enter an end sector, or do the
arithmetic and enter a size) would have helped too.  See below about
bsdlabel.

>> Problem 3 is comparatively minor: when editing a number (eg, when
>> patching up the damage done by problem 1), if the first character
>> typed is a backspace, it deletes not the last character, but the
>> whole number...
> You didn't try hard enough!

Oh, I know how to make it not do this - type something else as the
first character.  But it is extremely annoying, at least, to forget
that it's necessary to type something else first and lose the first
half-dozen digits of a number I wanted to change only the last two or
three digits of.

Not crippling.  I can always cancel out and redo it.  But very
annoying.  If it even were to keep the original value displayed
somewhere (else) while editing that value, that would help.  (Ideally,
I would like to see the whole partition table while editing values;
this "we're going to take over the screen and if anything of the parent
context remains visible it's coincidence" design approach is fine for
osme things, but it's a major pain when it comes to something like
editing partition tables.  I regularly (well, regularly among the times
I use sysinst) have to resort to writing values down because there's no
way to have the values they're derived from visible when I'm entering
the new values.

I would _so_ much prefer a scrolling-tty editor a la sunlabel (I have
one called (imaginatively enough) bsdlabel, which manipulates BSD
disklabels[%]) than the pseudo-GUI-in-text horror sysinst imposes.  But
that's one of the things I don't expect NetBSD to care about.

> The 'delete everything' is a shortcut because you want to do that
> quite often!

Maybe _you think_ I want to do that often.

If so, you are wrong.

In the partition editor in question, I have wanted to edit the last few
digits of a number _at least_ ten times for every time I've wanted to
throw out the whole number and reenter it from scratch.

/~\ The ASCII                             Mouse
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[%] Which anyone who cares to bother FTPing it is welcome to a copy of.
    It currently is abysmally documented; I really need to write both
    internal comments and a manpage.
    ftp.rodents-montreal.org:/mouseware/hacks/bsdlabel.c