From e8ec521dc64208016b0dc8dcb873324819ed734d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Richard W.M. Jones" Date: Mon, 14 May 2012 15:32:08 +0100 Subject: todo: Notes about partitioning tools. --- TODO | 25 +++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 25 insertions(+) diff --git a/TODO b/TODO index d604d10e..93f8787a 100644 --- a/TODO +++ b/TODO @@ -477,3 +477,28 @@ Optimize the appliance ---------------------- Pass -cpu host. Anything else? + +Sort out partitioning +--------------------- + +Ignoring some legacy APIs, we currently have a mixed selection of +'part-*' APIs, implemented using parted. We don't like parted or +libparted very much, and would love to replace it with something else. +The part-* APIs are quirky, but not too bad and we should maintain and +extend them instead of making another set of APIs. + +One option is to write "libmbr" and "libgpt" libraries that would just +do MBR and GPT respectively, and do it directly and do it well. They +wouldn't try to abstract anything (so, unlike libparted). We could +then reimplement the part-* APIs on top of these hopefully sensible +libraries. This is a lot of work. + +Another option is to look for tools or libraries to replace parted. +For GPT there is a fairly obvious candidate: Rod Smith's GPT fdisk +(http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/). Rod has spent a lot of time +studying GPT, and seems to know more about it than any sane man +should. There is a command line tool designed for scripts called +'sgdisk'. The tools are packaged for many Linux distros. Even if +this approach works, it doesn't solve the MBR problem, so likely we'd +have to write a library for that (or perhaps go back to sfdisk but +using a very abstracted interface over sfdisk). -- cgit