[13:24] <btorch> not sure if the correct channel but I'm trying to understand partman for a seed file. debconf-get-selections shows partman lines without starting with d-i but most examples I've has the d-i in front of it. what is the correct way ?
[13:47] <blut> btorch: in the preseed file you need the d-i.
[13:53] <btorch> blut: ok so "To set a value to be used inside debian-installer, just pass path/to/variable=value for any of the preseed variables"
[13:53] <blut> yes. but you need to say that it's for the debian installer (d-i)
[13:54] <btorch> it's just weird to me that some of the partman seeding that I've done comes back as "unknown partman-auto/method string  regular"
[13:54] <blut> btorch: because the installed system doesn't know d-i
[13:55] <btorch> ok, I see . so I'm doing it correclyt then with "d-i partman-auto/method string regular" , it's just debconf-get-selections that doesn't know the d-i
[14:08] <cjwatson> The owner field mostly isn't critical.
[14:08] <cjwatson> Its purpose is garbage-collection of unused questions.
[14:08] <cjwatson> So anything with the owner set to "d-i" isn't copied to the installed system.
[14:09] <cjwatson> If the owner is set to something else, it should be a package name that exists on the installed system, and the question will be GCed from the debconf database if that package is ever purged.
[14:09] <cjwatson> But you can get this wrong and the worst consequence is a bit of stray junk that mostly doesn't matter.
[14:11] <btorch> ok thanks, trying to figure why my seed no longer works for 14.04.05 and why on new drives it gets stuck on the partitioning and on already used drives it doesn't partition everything properly. But I think I know why on the second case now
[14:12] <btorch> I think getting the output of "debconf-get-selections --installer" is not helping much though
[14:23] <btorch> is this bad ? "partman-auto  partman-auto/autopartitioning_failed  error" I see some questions/answers like that from debconf
[14:23] <btorch> with the "error"
[14:43] <cjwatson> debconf-get-selections --installer has never filtered down to only what's actually sensible to preseed - you're better off comparing it with the installation guide's preseeding appendix than taking its output literally
[14:43] <cjwatson> it will have stuff like that that's to do with d-i's interactive workflow and is not sensible to preseed
[14:44] <cjwatson> normally I advise starting with the example preseed file in the guide, and you can always use debconf-get-selections --installer to work out what values to plug in in various places
[14:45] <btorch> cool, yeah going over appendix B and also https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/d-i/ for some of the partman templates
[14:45] <btorch> I think the "partman/early_command" to zero out the first 512b of the sda will fix one of my issues