Re: Parted 1.5.1-pre1

[Andrew Clausen]

Ben Collins wrote:
> There's also the fact that this can further support partition
> descriptions for mass installs. This same mechanism can take a flat file
> description of a partition table something like this:
> 
> ----------------
> Label: sun
> 
> Partition: 1
> Type: ext2
> Start: 0
> Size: all
> 
> Partition: 2
> Type: linux-swap
> End: end
> Size: 128M
> ----------------
> 
> This is pretty simplistic (maybe an XML format would be easier to
> parse). Basically this would say "make a swap partition 128M in size at
> the end of the disk, and the make the rest of the disk an ext2
> partition". I'm sure you can see the possibilities here. The only
> alternative right now is to script the parted program.

I think this is a bad idea, as you put it.  "Backing up" a partition
table means you want to be able to reconstruct exactly.  This means
you have to worry about lots of annoying crap like CHS geometry,
and partition alignment.

If you want to reproduce an "identical" installation... well, I don't
think you do ;-)  For example: what if you have different sized
hard disks?  You might want to allocate the space with some algorithm.

I think having configuration files to store such setups is a good
idea, but it's different to backing up partition tables (which is
also useful)

That said, I'm not sure saving "setups" is something for Parted... it
sounds like it's always used in the context of an installation,
or something.  In which case, the installer, or whatever, will have
it's own ideas about having to replicate a configuration (everything
from background pictures in X, to network config... etc.)

Andrew Clausen