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

[Sven Luther]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 10:15:08PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> 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. 

Bah, you provide one source package which provides the .udeb and the .deb, i
have some doubts about the usability of this in the installed system, where
you would have no excuse to use the real thing :)

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

Hey, please don't jump to hasty conclusions, did i not start my reply with
nice patch, and i have no doubt it will get integrated. I still think this is
not the right way, but hey, you wrote the patch, so no reason not to include
it.

Friendly,

Sven Luther