Am Freitag, den 06.02.2009, 07:07 +0100 schrieb phcoder:
If I understood you correctly you propose to use partition table
information to determine filesystem. I'm personally against it. First of
all it isn't portable - it probably wouldn't work on GPT. Second if you
just do mkfs.* <device> the partition type isn't changed. Linux ignores
partition type and so if your patch is applied there will be many bug
reports like "hey, *FS isn't detected". Finally sometimes you
intentionally change partition type in the technics like partition
hiding. IMO the correct solution to this problem is to make sure that
fat and ntfs are probed at last. Should we add a priority field for this?
No I don't want to check the partition type.
FAT partitions normally have the string FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 at the
beginning of 512 bytes of the partition. But these DELL FAT partions
have there the string .AT16 so it would be a solution for the Debian bug
report we got.
But yes the best would be to probe for FAT at last but I don't know how
to change the order, in fs.lst FAT is listed after ext2 but it seems
that FAT is checked before ext2.