Re: [PATCH] diskpart

[Neal H Walfield]

> > What do you recommend happen when one does a chown part/1?  How about
> > a chown part?  Should they effect the entire tree?
> 
> Eh, whatever.  I think it would be ok for these to fail with EOPNOTSUPP.
> Changing the root node would be ok too, but probably surprising to someone
> who thought they could set the individual nodes separately.

Ok, ch* on the root node changes all of the nodes and a ch* on any of
the leaf nodes returns EROFS.  Reasonable?
 
> I have since been reminded of GNU Parted and the library that goes with it.
> Can we use that?

I started exploring it about two weeks ago; it is well written (wrt
being os-independent).  Thus, I imagine that we could use that.

> > > * I'd like to see partition handling that is a bit more generic.  e.g.,
> > >   look for partition tables within partitions and make hierachical
> > >   pseudo-directories, etc.
> > 
> > PCBIOS partition table are a linked list, so I am not sure it makes
> > sense in this context.  It might be useful with BSD partitions, then one
> > might have:
> > 
> > /dev/sd0/1
> > /dev/sd0/2
> > /dev/sd0/3
> > /dev/sd0/4/a
> > /dev/sd0/4/b
> > /dev/sd0/4/d
> 
> That's what I had in mind.  But there's no reason it oughtn't detect a PC
> partition table within a PC partition table and behave accordingly, even if
> a PC doesn't.

We do detect logical partitions, however, having a tree structure does
not make sense.  The primary partition table may have either 3 primary
partitions and an extended partition or four primary partitions.
An extended partition may contain either an extended partition and a
logical partition or a logical partition.  Generally, extended
partitions are unnamed.  Given this, what are you suggesting?

> > With openbsd partition tables, one might have repetition of partitions,
> > however, I assume this would make sense.
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean.

OpenBSD disklabels, unlike NetBSD and FreeBSD, contain the entire disk.
Thus, if I labeled the third logical partition in FreeBSD style, I
would only name the partitions in the logical partitions.  In OpenBSD,
the primary partitions and the rest of the logical partitions would also
be referenced in the disklabel.

> > > And finally, the most deep and important question for any program: the 
> > > name.
> > > I think we should call it partitionfs.
> > 
> > I choose diskpart as the empty directories were already present in CVS.
> 
> Heh.  Well, names change.  We have heretofore called everything that
> provides a directory tree *fs, and called the single-node things *io.

Well, then I would be happy with either partitionfs or diskpartfs --
your call.

BTW, the next patch that I submit, do you want a patch against the first
patch or against a clean tree?

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