Re: hello, hurd support, other ideas

[Andrew Clausen]

Glenn McGrath wrote:
> I was talking to Timshel Knoll today regarding parted, and it prompted
> me to join the list to discuss a few ideas.

You live in Melbourne?  Should chat soon... I'm off to Brazil in
a 2-4 weeks (long story as to why I don't know the exact date,
but I should know in ~3 hours ;-)

> 1) Hurd support
>         The Hurd doesnt have any working partitioning programs at the moment,
> this is biggest (only) problem holding back a native hurd installer,
> which would be a really good thing for them.

Yep.  I would certainly like to make Parted more portable.
 
> 2) fdisk style user interface
>         I started working on a interface that implemented only traditonal 
> fdisk
> functionality, i think it could be handy for people to be able to use
> libparted for basic partitioning without having to learn a new commands.
>         Im not sure what i did with the interface, but i remember it didnt 
> take
> much work, it would be fairly easy to knock it together.

I can't believe how many people are attached to fdisk!  Old
traditions...
 
> 3) dynamic loading modules
>         For a partitioning program i consider libparted to be pretty big 
> (maybe
> im being picky), it would be great if different functionality could be
> implemented in dynamic modules, that way some basic features could work
> in a more restricted space.

I've been thinking about this, too.  It would be useful to have
Parted on boot/rescue disks, but including FAT support on a Mac
boot disk is a waste of space!
 
> My motivation for these features comes from working on the next debian
> installer.

Sounds good :-)
 
> Im willing to work on these features after i spend a bit of time on
> another program, just thought i should mention it here anyway.

Excellent :-)

Andrew Clausen