Re: Feature request: Show gaps and partitions sizes

[Sven Luther]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 11:29:28AM +1000, Andrew Clausen wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 17, 2004 at 11:54:47PM +0300, address@hidden wrote:
> > 
> > There would be two things that would make parted more useful.
> > 
> > 1) If the partitions are not consequent, ie. there is free space
> > between them - a gap - , it would be good if the "print" command
> > reported [gap XXX bytes, kilos ...] between them.
> > 
> > Looking at the pure BEG and END values is hard to "see" where the gaps would
> > be and how to make informed partition chnages.
> 
> OK, I'm convinced.  Anyone else have an opinion?

I believe it is a good idea.

> > 2) The "print" listing is desperately missing the total size of the 
> > partition.
> > This would help great deal deciding how to resize or chnage the partitions.
> 
> Can't fit everything!  You can type "print 5" to find the size of
> partition 5, but if you didn't realize that, then 90% of users probably
> won't either.

What about a pring_large or some optioonal options to print to show more
info. That said, the command line parsing is not all that robust, as
shown in the mkpart example, where you always have to enter primary and
ext2, which mostly doesn't make sense in most cases, but i will try to
submit a patch for this in the next week or two.

> > Examples below. Note, I did not change the values, just added the cases
> > I raised for 1 and 2 to show what I meant.
> 
> I only got one example.
> 
> >                          This field could record the END - START
> >                          |
> > Minor    Start       End     Size  Type      Filesystem  Flags
> > 1          0.031    753.046         primary   ext2        boot
> > 2        753.047  28615.781         extended              lba
> > 5        753.078   4702.851         logical   ext3        
> > [gap 2500k]                     
> > 6       4702.882   8704.335         logical   ext3        
> > 7       8704.367  26711.015         logical   ext3        
> > [gap 5567k]                     
> > 8      28099.015  28615.781         logical   linux-swap  
> 
> [the one example]
> 
> Note: some partition table formats have partition names.  These also
> take up screen space...

Well, but few people really use smallish consoles nowaday, so having an
option for a more advanced print option would be a good thing,
especially as it would be good to add also the filesystem type the
partition table believes a partition is, in addition to the probed
filesystem, as some bioses (well, the amiga one does) may use this
information at boot time for choosing the file system a partition should
have.

Friendly,

Sven Luther