bug#24502: [PATCH] libparted: Show partition boundaries in sectors by default

[Chris Johnson]

I'm an admin who prefers details and exact info - I almost always work in 
sectors.  

> On Oct 14, 2016, at 3:43 PM, John Pittman <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Hi Phil,
> 
>> Kickstart isn't the typical intended user of parted, and if it wants
>> sectors it can request them.
> 
> I didn't claim it was, I was using it as an example to show that users don't 
> necessarily 
> need the default print to be compact and likely won't even need to look at it 
> at all.
> Another and the best example of this, I suppose, would be parted's claim to 
> fame, 
> the script function.  If you're running things from the command line ,or even 
> more so, from 
> a script, users do not generally print after creation.
> 
>> Yes, seeing the exact sectors is sometimes useful when troubleshooting,
>> and you can easily request that, but most of the time people people
>> don't need to be concerned with sectors and prefer to work in gb, which
>> is why that is the default.  The lvm user interface also does not
>> normally care about sectors.
> 
> Seeing sectors is always useful, not sometimes.  It's GB or MB (more and more 
> these days TB) 
> or any higher level measurement that is only sometimes useful.  And if I'm 
> not mistaken, 
> lvm uses sector boundaries as a guide to writing it's labels/metadata.  
> Higher level 
> measurements are only useful with creation and whole disk size printing.
> 
>> How do you figure?  If I want a 10 gb root partition and a 100gb home
>> partition, I tell parted to make a partition starting at 1m that is 10g
>> long and another starting at 10g and is 100g long.  When I print the
>> table to check what I have done, I expect to see 10g and 100g, not
>> whatever that works out to in sectors.
> 
> This is the one and only argument I could think of for keeping print at 
> default compact.  But the user can as easily add a 'u GB' or any other unit
> as they can a 'u s'.
> 
> Further, if a user comes to the parted tool to create, they will specify the 
> unit in almost all
> cases.  I have never seen, in my working with admins and the like, a case 
> where they do not.
> However, if they come to the parted tool using the print command, they are 
> looking for 
> information for any number of reasons.  This information should be provided 
> in the exact
> form of sectors.  We should not choose for them how exact the information 
> should be.  This
> is very different than parted automatically choosing the alignment because 
> there is no 
> inquiry into the partition structure by the user going on in that case.
>