Re: Parted 1.5.1-pre

[Dan Knapp]

> 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.

  "Backing up" a partition table for restoration on the same machine is
certainly worthwhile, I think all three of us agree.

  The more templatized specifications may or may not be.  Distribution
installers can always write a sequence of commands to be executed by the
partitioning software of their choice, and are much more likely to be able
to capture the needs of a variety of systems in an automated way than a
simple file with parameters such as "fill rest of disk" and "allocate 128M
from the end as swap" is.  There's certainly a use for "flat mirroring" -
for example, when you buy 20 or 200 machines at the same time, you could
set up the partition table then transfer the filesystems over the network.
Of course, just because they're sold as the same model doesn't mean all their
components are identical...  Are installers really that bad that it's
preferable to forgo them, though?

  However, it certainly would be possible to find some semantics that would
allow one to omit the details that are going to be changed between
restorations (on the principle of minimizing the number of parsers in a given
program, sure, no reason not to make the backups and the configuration files
use the same format) and specify how they are to be calculated.


> 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)

  I would even say that those configuration files would be redundant.
Scripting suffices and is probably more versatile.


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