Re: Source missing and project dead?

[Andrew Clausen]

Hi Petter,

On Sun, Dec 21, 2003 at 10:42:53AM +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> Checking <URL:ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/>, I notice that the source
> for parted is missing, and has been missing for half a year.

Yep.

> Also, there haven't been a new source release of parted for ages, even
> if patches are sent in from the maintainers in different Linux
> distributions.  Are there no one developing libparted any more?

I haven't had time to look after Parted lately, correct.

> I hope I am wrong.  Who is the main developer at the moment?

I am officially the maintainer.

> I believe it is important that parted and libparted is aktively
> developed, as this project is used by several installers of Linux
> distributions.  It would be sad if no coordination of patches is done
> across distributions.

Agreed.

I have been very busy during the year with my studies.  I expect to
be less busy in 2004.  My studies won't involve writing programs - or
much computer science in general, so working with Parted will probably
be more attractive to me anyway.

I have spent a fair bit of time trying to resolve the ftp.gnu.org issues
- but not enough to actually resolve them :/  Security problems are
nasty.  It would be helpful if there were some more hand-holding...
(I'm been having problems using gpg, and haven't had enough time to
figure it out on my own).

Parted's ext2 support is very time consuming to maintain.  It really
should just use e2fsprogs.  Then there's the reiserfs and hfs patches
to integrate, amiga table support...
(While "fringe" stuff might not seem important, it can be for
multi-platform distribitions trying to have a common installer, etc.)

In general, I think Parted needs a big time investment to get it back
on track.  I guess this would be worth it...

Why does anyone use (lib)parted instead of EVMS?  Is it better to spend
the time to add missing features to EVMS?  I think it would be helpful
for both Parted and EVMS people to know ;)

Cheers,
Andrew