Re: FAQ bug

[Erik Troan]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2002 22:37:49 +0900
"Yoshinori K. Okuji" <address@hidden> wrote:

> At Mon, 11 Feb 2002 11:07:39 GMT,
> address@hidden wrote:
> > Etc etc. You see that the general tendency is to indicate the
> > function of the partition, or some property of the partition,
> > and that only by coincidence sometimes the partition ID implies
> > a particular filesystem type.
> 
> Ok, I see how badly partition types are used. I'll remove the sentence
> "A partition type should mean...".

It's really even worse the Andries indicates. There are more filesystem types 
then partition codes, so thery get double uses even if things are set up right. 
One of my least favorite examples of this is 0x83 being used for Linux swap and 
Solaris/x86 filesystems. Needless to say, doing blindly running mkswap on the 
later is *not* a good idea!

Partition types really should be completely ignored by every program other then 
fdisk, which should limit it's interaction with them to reading them only. It's 
unfortunate this rule isn't more widely followed (i.e. Linux RAID autostart).

Erik

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|               "Distracting? I'm inspiring"                                |
|                              - Sally Bowles in Cabaret                    |