Parted 1.5.5-pre1

[Andrew Clausen]

Hi all,

This (development) release of Parted moves _arch* functions into
vtables, and adds a PedArchitecture abstraction, so you can register
your own architecture (eg: EVMS ;), which can provide devices, and
an interface for communicating updates to the "arch's" kernel.
(eg: instructing it to reread the partition table, or checking if
a partition is mounted, etc.)

This change is motivated by EVMS (see previous thread)... so I hope
you guys like it!  (Please complain if you don't!)  I hope it should be
trivial to port EVMS to libparted now (<200 lines?)

I originally thought it wouldn't make sense to allow more than one
architecture in a binary.  However, on Linux, for example, the
libparted .so will want to support Linux, but the EVMS engine will want
to be able to switch to EVMS.  These changes DON'T allow libparted to
simulatenously have direct access to Linux devices and say EVMS
devices.  Only one arch at a time is allowed.  This simplifies things
a little bit (everything goes through one global variable, rather than
each device and partition table knowing what arch it is).  Is this ok?

I haven't tested the GNU/Hurd code (I still haven't installed it - anyone
got a box I can ssh into?  Since I'll be travelling soonish, installing
it won't help much anyway).  I don't think there should be any problems...

Andrew