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From: | leslie . polzer |
Subject: | [bug-fdisk] Preparing for a "Switch" campaign |
Date: | Fri, 7 Jul 2006 21:38:18 +0200 |
User-agent: | mutt-ng/devel-r804 (Linux) |
Hello everyone interested in GNU Parted and GNU fdisk, the finishing of the cfdisk program in autumn marks an excellent point to think about the future and talk about a concept that will enable us to slowly replace obsolete partitioning programs in the UNIX world. Attached to this mail is a draft of a paper which shows some reasons why this is a Good Thing(tm). It is important to discuss these things now since there are a lot of things to be done I know right now, and probably a whole lot more you will come up with. Getting 'libparted' ready means: * revising the documentation * creating an API that enables us to call external programs in a more or less well-defined way * supporting real partition IDs * fixing BSD support * testing it THOROUGHLY Getting 'parted' ready means * fixing the "print all" command as described in an earlier post to parted-devel. * making it support "raw" partition resizing (independent from the data contained) * removing the newly introduced "NAME" parameter from "mkpart" * adding a script-friendly output interface (also discussed earlier on parted-devel) * testing it THOROUGHLY Getting 'lfdisk', the replacement for Linux fdisk, ready means: * adapting its output to match that of its role model more closely * cleaning up the code, while possibly reusing code common with cfdisk * testing it THOROUGHLY I invite you all to partitipate in both discussion and coding, whatever suits you. My schedule for July is crammed (apart from the weekends, but I suspect that may change soon as well), but after that I can probably work half-time on it. Kind regards, Leslie -- gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 0x52D70289 http://nic-nac-project.de/~skypher/
Partitioning is not something you do every day. Neither is it perceived as a difficult or error-prone operation. This, among with other factors, leads to the viewpoint that every partitioning tool will do an equally well job.
For most partitioning programs, this viewpoint is correct. However, GNU Parted plays in a different league. To see what benefits for partitioning a switch to GNU Parted gives you, please read on.
GNU Parted automatically "does what you mean". It will align partitions exactly at the boundaries of their neighbours and thereby let you use the maximum amount of your disk's space. The amount of space automatically claimed is guessed from the unit you are using. For example, if you partition your disk in "Gigabytes", it will move up to one GB in either direction, while the radius will be only one MB if you are using "Megabytes". This feature also allows fuzzy specification of coordinates. Other partitioning tools will offer you only "sectors" (units of varying size) as unit or, if you are lucky, let you choose among a few that act the same without any smart behaviour.
GNU Parted knows about and works around most quirks other software has, be it drivers, operating systems, your BIOS or other partitioning programs.
Do you know that the partition table format currently in use by the majority of operating systems is a more than 20 year old relict from MS-DOS? And that there already is a designated successor from Intel named «GPT»? GNU Parted is the only tool that supports working with GPT partition tables. It also supports disks with physical sector sizes not equal to 512 (see bigsector.org for more information). Both features are growing more and more important, until they will also affect you.
GNU Parted is in daily production use in small, medium and large companies all over the world. This includes, for example, HP and SGI. It is also shipped with the enterprise editions of RedHat Linux and SuSE Linux.
Maintained by a team of volunteer specialists, bugs in GNU Parted are fixed
quickly. New feature requests are being accepted readily and implemented
as soon as time and energy permit.
The code is well-written, with portability, modularity and maintainability
in mind.
Most other partitioning tools are orphaned or a small side project of developers usually working on other things.
GNU Parted currently runs on GNU/Linux, GNU/Hurd, BeOS/Zeta/Haiku
and FreeBSD and can easily be ported to other platforms. All other
partitioning tools we know of are written for a single platform.
With GNU Parted, you can find a familiar program everywhere.
Return to GNU's home page.
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Please send comments on these web pages to address@hidden , send other questions to address@hidden.
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Updated: $Date: 2006/05/27 12:56:30 $ $Author: skypher $
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