Re: Parted 1.6.12

[Sven Luther]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 09:41:28AM +1000, Andrew Clausen wrote:
> Hi all,

Hello Andrew,

I have been tryint to upgrade the debian package from a patched 1.6.9 to this
1.6.12. Am i correct in thinking that the geometry change was the one which
broke backward binary compatibility and forced a soname change, or was there
something else involved ? 

> Parted 1.6.12 is now available for download at ftp.gnu.org and
> from CVS (cvs.alioth.debian.org:/cvsroot/parted, module "stable").
> 
> The big news in this release is that Parted now assigns an opinion
> about what the CHS geometry is to each partition, rather than to
> a whole device.  This means it is more robust when there are
> inconsistent partition tables.
> 
> It also inspects file systems to find CHS geometry.

I also had to report the amiga patch, which you didn't apply to the main CVS
tree (any particular reason for that ?). On amiga partition tables, the
geometry is written in the partition table. When the partition table is first
written, that data is read from the hw geometry (in the parted case), or using
some more advanced heuristic (in the third party tools case). Since partitions
are located on cylinder boundaries, this is rather important to get done
right.

When reading a partition table, i used to get the values from the partition
table, and overwrite the dev->cylinders|heads|sectors data, and used that in
the rest of it. Maybe this was not the best solution, but it seemed to work.
Now, we have a bios_geometry, and a hw_geometry. And which one would i need to
set ? Also, i wonder what is the meaning of the bios_geometry on not-x86
hardware, but will probably need to check the source for it.

Also, you don't seem to have updated doc/API.

> Together, these two features should make libparted much more robust
> with DOS partition tables, and hopefully all the dual boot problems
> will go away shortly.

What about non-DOS partition tables ?

Friendly,

Sven Luther