Re: Current issues

[K.G.]

On Thu, 03 Nov 2005 15:32:08 -0200 Otavio Salvador <address@hidden> wrote:
> "K.G." <address@hidden> writes:
> > > * code analysis tools: what do you think about setting up LXR and 
> > > nightly-updated Doxygen docs on our Berlios space? Too much overhead?
> > > Good idea?
> >
> > For me it's a good idea. I would also like a wiki or something to discuss
> > about long term changes, a 1.7 branch, ...
> 
> Would be good if we build a development page inside of Alioth. Or, if
> you like, we can use wiki.debian.net for it. Its already done and
> working so we won't need to install anything.
> > * Apples iPod: Apple messed the whole msdos partition format on their iPods;
> > they did an awfull mix between DBR and MBR, used a system partition with
> > ID 0 (which means Free), ... Never seen anything so stupid before :)
> > So I did a quick hack to let Parted work with this strange format, but
> > i'm not really happy with it. I'm not sure this is really important to let
> > people use Parted on their msdos formated iPod anyway, especially if it
> > means supporting broken things. Maybe a detection and a message saying
> > that Apple uses a broken partition table format on their dos formated iPod
> > would be better. I really don't want to do any kind of voluntary after
> > sale support for Apple because of their own mess.
> 
> Would be better to support iPod case like another partition format?
> like Apple iPod partition format? So we can leave it clear for the
> enduser that isn't compatible at all with msdos.

Well, it clearly isn't compatible with msdos because it's broken, but it
works well under Windows and even the Linux partition parser: the first
one doesn't even know the system partition exists, while Linux put it in
partition 1. Everything (but broken things :P ) is the same as in msdos,
so it's not a good idea to duplicate msdos and change 20 lines. The only
concern I've with merging it is for maintenability, and also because in
my code you can neither create a broken iPod partition table nor a broken
iPod system partition (or should I say Free partition :D ). If we add
stuffs to edit the partition ID in a clean way the situation might change
(and we should do that because hundreds of "flags" to force particular
partition ID is ugly and dirty and error prone IMHO, there's a clear need
for a generic attributes system for both disklabel and partitions).
Anyway fdisk seems to be usable to edit or create those strange tables.

Cheers,
Guillaume