parted pre9

[Ethan Benson]

Hi, 

testing parted again, have a few things:

when i tried to create an extended partition on a pc98 label i got:

(parted) mkpart extended 100 150
You found a bug in GNU Parted.  Please email a bug report to
address@hidden containing the version (1.4.0-pre9), and the
following message:

Assertion (supports_extended || type != PED_PARTITION_EXTENDED) at
disk.c:615 in function ped_partition_new() failed.
Ignore Cancel ? c
(parted)

i assume pc98 does away with the primary/logical/extended sillyness?  

also it seems that every partition you create in a pc98 label is
marked bootable, and cannot be marked otherwise is this normal? 

i also noticed when you create a intel partition table parted asks if
you want to install the parted bootloader (if none exists) if you say
no, parted will ask again on your next command (mkpart whatever) and
if you still say no it will ask you again on the next command (set 2
boot on whatever) iow it will ask you over and over and over and over
and over and over again until you give in and say yes ;-) 

i can't reproduce the spurious Apple_Void creation anymore.  

can you do anything to make `mkpart primary hfs 0.032 0.812' create a
1600 block partition instead of 1599?  (0.813 creates it a bit over
1600) 

one limitation i found in the regular intel partition table editing,
you cannot set the partition type with parted, it seems to try and set
it for you based in the filesystem you choose but this won't always
work.  one albeit contrived example is `mkpart primary|logical hfs 20 30' 
which sets the partition type to 83.  however a less contrived example
is RS6000 powerpcs or PReP boxes, which use intel partition tables and
use a type 41 PReP Boot bootstrap partition, where a bootloader or the
kernel is dded directly on it.  (or some others use a FAT filesystem
with a bootloader similar to the NewWorld ybin/yaboot setup)  there is
also BSD disklabel partitions, type a6 for OpenBSD a7 for NeXTSTEP,
and many many others.   i think parted really need to display the
partition type (not just primary,logical,extended) and allow for it to
be explicity changed.  otherwise people will have to use the old fdisk
just to fix partition types.  a way to set arbitrary types on mac
partitions would be useful too IMO.  

can you change `set x boot on' to set the partition name to
`bootstrap' for mac partition tables?  i think this is better then
leaving it `untitled'.  

one idea i had about the interface of parted, what about making some
commands optionally interactive?  so instead of having to type `mkpart
primary blah foo bar' over and over again, run:

mkpart

which then prompts for primary or logical, with default being primary
(or logical if thats all that is possible anymore).  then it asks for
filesystem type, default ext2, then it asks start, then end.  

something like:

(parted) mkpart
(parted) mkpart> type? [primary]:
(parted) mkpart> filesystem? [ext2]: 
(parted) mkpart> start? [5.001]:
(parted) mkpart> end? [258.213]:
(parted)

just a rough idea...

one could also run `mkpart --batch' where once a partition is created
it immediatly starts over for the next partition, until no more space
is left.  mkpartfs could work identicly except for formatting the
partition.  

this would save for alot of typing and allow for a similar (but far
better) interface to fdisk.  i personally find the interactive
partition creation of fdisk to be quite convenient and allows me to
partition a disk very quickly.  it would also be more consistent with
the way parted itself works, as in you can run either:

parted /dev/sda mkpart primary ext2 1 5 

or

parted /dev/sda
> mkpart primary ext2 1 5
> quit

what do you think?  (not for 1.4 but maybe in the next version) 

also you have my email address in the THANKS file but its wrong, im
address@hidden not address@hidden (unfortuantly, someone else got
`eb' ...) thanks for the mention though ;-)

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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