Re: Re: ntfs resize and gtk frontends

[Szakacsits Szabolcs]

On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, Sven Luther wrote:
> I know nothing about ntfs, but i suppose it is somewhat silly to have to
> mount the partition while resizing it.

It's called online resizing. XFS, JFS, reiserfs support online expansion.

However NTFS resizing is offline and it's indeed unwise to have the
partition mounted, actually so much that resizing isn't possible if 
the partition is found to be mounted.

The source of confusion is the somewhat misnomer naming. Opening a device
is done in libntfs by ntfs_mount().  In short the device/partition must be
open/closed three times during shrinkage in some cases.

> > > I am interested by your opinion, what is it in parted that you dislike

Note, you asked about parted, not libparted so this is why I wrote about
parted.

> >     Knowing where things are in sector level is very important 
> >     occasionally.
> 
> Notice that this is a critic of the parted program, it doesn't apply to
> the underlying libparted, which is what matters. 

Of course, but when you have to investigate user issues you can't say them
"just hack libparted".

> Libparted uses geometries which are of the start/end/size kind of
> information, where all three of those are 64bit integers.

But this geometry isn't the disk C/H/S geometry however start/end/size are
in sectors, right?
 
> This is a real problem, but again not one of libparted per see, more one
> linked to the fact that there is no open CVS or whatever repository.
> This has to be solved soon, or parted will be forked or something.

E.g. somebody (you? :) could help out Andrew and if he still won't have
time then incrementally take over maintainership, or something :)
 
> Just a general impression, and the lack of accessible CVS repository
> doesn't help. The parted UI often dies for no reason at all, there are
> some garbage asserts in there which are leftover and makes thing fail
> horribly in some cases, and so on. I think the main problem is that
> there is need of more active maintaining and some cleanup of the
> internal stuff.

This is my impression also. I would _do_ love to recommend parted to
people because doing an ntfsresize + Parted's 'resize' looks much easier,
safer than doing 14 steps with fdisk. But fdisk works (altough that one
also has its own slight problems :-/).
 
> The objection i would have, would be more that you would have to bind in
> the ocaml runtime and virtual machine, which may be problematic in the
> small size initrd case of installers, 

I didn't mention this because I thought it's not true anymore.

Cheers,
        Szaka