Many folks have rightfully complained that "partition_select" (which is there to automate the setup of the part of the kickstart that sets up a good deafult disk configuration) is a bit sneaky because it includes a "%pre" that is not readily obvious.
While I am going to continue to ship the old snippet, new versions of cobbler will do this:
# Magically figure out how to partition this thing SNIPPET::main_partition_select
%pre SNIPPET::pre_partition_select $kickstart_start %end
%packages %end
The difference is that the one snippet is now two, so the %pre isn't embedded. This makes a lot more sense. For F9-and-before distros, it will be the same as the above with no "%end".
I've also make some edits to make sure "$kickstart_start" (which is needed for "cobbler status" to work effectively) is included in all of the base kickstarts.
When making your own kickstart files, look at these for reference of how to templatize a basic kickstart so it automates better with Cobbler.
And again, as we will continue to ship the old snipppet, your existing kickstart files will not break if you decide to not update them to the .rpmnew versions.
--Michael