Re: Questions, additions, and ideas.

[Andrew Clausen]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 05:56:42PM -0600, Harley D. Eades III wrote:
> Hello,
> I have been mucking around with an idea with some older cvs sources.
> There more then likely is a good reason why parted doesn't do this
> already but I am going to bring it up anyway.  Parted currently
> commits changes to disk as soon as they happen.  I have implemented
> with very little change a parted that has an 'undo' command and only
> writes the partition changes to disk when the user issues a write.

What about resizing operations?

BTW, the introduction of ped_disk_duplicate() was motivated by "undo".

> Basically the changes I have made where the passing/returning of args
> to/from functions instead of passing a PedDevice we create only one
> per disk then pass the PedDisk around altering the struct that way.
> When ever one needs to access the PedDeivce one uses disk->dev. This
> seems to work very well.  The reader is probably wondering why I
> changed parted.  Well upon request from several GNU/Hurd devs I have
> start to create an interface to libparted that looks and acts exactly
> like fdisk but with added parted bells and whistles.  I have actually
> coded the fdisk interface and it now holds every fdisk command plus
> every parted command.  This brings up another question is the idea of
> parted being packaged with three interfaces exceed the boundary of
> possibility? See if not then by default parted would compile the
> traditional parted interface.  Then if the user would want others they
> could add options to the configure script i.e. configure --int=fdisk,
> --int=cfdisk, --int=fdiskfam(both fdisk, cfdisk) or --int=all(fdisk,
> cfdisk, and parted).  This I think along with several others would be
> a good addition for parted.  I have talked with several people and a
> large number of them say they don't use parted because there used to
> the fdisk interface.  Then I ask would they use it if parted looked
> and felt like fdisk and they always return a yes.  Like I said in the
> subject these a merely ideas, ideas that I have working demos of but
> none the less ideas.  Please comments and feedback are what I am
> requesting so please do.  Thanks again and happy hackin g.

Most people probably don't realize that Parted's interface allows you to
issue commands interactively, with Parted prompting for each parameter
one-by-one (much like fdisk).  Perhaps the general help text should not
list the parameters.

In any case, I think having a fdisk and cfdisk clones would be useful.

Cheers,
Andrew