Re: [PATCH] Enhancements to parted's partition table printing

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 10:53:54PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 08:46:22PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> > At present, the 'parted' command-line tool is really more useful for
> > interactive use than anything else. The particular deficiency that's
> > biting me is that there's no really good way to use it to dump out a
> > list of all the partitions on the system and their properties in a way
> > that can be read by scripts such as those in the Debian installer. While
> > it's certainly possible to write small programs using libparted that do
> > what we need (and indeed we already have a couple of those), these then
> > require their own packaging in the installer, live CDs, and suchlike,
> > and I've been thinking recently that it might be better to take the
> > small step required to make the parted program usable for this purpose.
> 
> Nice patch, but i still think that there is no guarantee that future versions
> of parted will not breka this batch-abi or whatever you call it, and it is
> still recomended to use the actual libparted that way.
> 
> You could even imagine writing your own libparted based wrapper to output the
> values you want in the format you most like,

We already have one of those (partconf-find-partitions). I was hoping to
kill it off, because frankly it's a nasty hack. :-)

Is it really hard to maintain a reasonably-parseable output format that
starts out designed to be parseable and with a comment in the code
saying "please only extend this in the following way"? Lots of other
programs manage it ...

> and then you would need to package it only once,

Twice, actually, if you want to provide it in the installed system as
well as the installer. 

But oh well, it was worth a try ...

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden