On Thu, May 07, 2009 at 06:34:29PM +0200, Zdenek Behan wrote:
> To make things short, after trying several different approaches, I ended
> up writing my own tiny utility that has as little functionality as
> needed for my exact need, but is able to create the GPT partition
> tables. That was mostly due to time constraints, because i already spent
> quite too much time dealing with the issue. However, for this kind of
> task, the perfect, most flexible, most simple, and scriptable tool still
> seems to be fdisk (and its variants), if it wasn't for the fact that it
> cannot create GPT headers, so IMO "fixing" fdisk is the right way to go.
Yes, it would be nice to have GPT support in fdisk(s).
<joke> Do you want to kill GNU Parted? Add GPT support to fdisk! </joke>
> GNU parted was way too bloated for my taste and for embedded use with
> its filesystem support, and it kept malfunctioning on arm machines.
Unfortunately, it seems that parted upstream is not ready to remove
FS-specific code from libparted. Reality is that many people don't
like this library now.
> To do things the clean way, the initial task is a massive
> cleanup/refactoring of the code, in some parts possibly even
> rewrite.
Yes, the code it terrible.
We need lightweight library for disk labels reading -- now we
duplicate PT parsing code in kpartx, partx, fdisks, libdisk and
HAL (and in Linux kernel;-)
My suggestion:
1) write "libptread" library
- use the library in partx-like programs and HAL
- remove libdisk from xfsprogs
- use the library in fdisks
2) write "libptwrite" library (with functionality like
add_partition, remove_partition, ...)
- use the library in fdisks
The "libptread" is more important for us now.
> 1) Most of the fdisk code is based around MSDOS partitioning scheme.
[...]
> 2) Separating disk-independent and disk-dependent utilities
[...]
> 3) Error reporting/handling
[...]
> 4) Global variables
[...]
> 5) Unified label handling between *fdisk
I think fdisk code could be refactored in parallel to work on the
libs. But don't forget to use small easy-to-review patches.
Karel
--
Karel Zak <kzak@xxxxxxxxxx>
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