Parted 1.6.12

[Andrew Clausen]

Hi all,

Parted 1.6.12 is now available for download at ftp.gnu.org and
from CVS (cvs.alioth.debian.org:/cvsroot/parted, module "stable").

The big news in this release is that Parted now assigns an opinion
about what the CHS geometry is to each partition, rather than to
a whole device.  This means it is more robust when there are
inconsistent partition tables.

It also inspects file systems to find CHS geometry.

Together, these two features should make libparted much more robust
with DOS partition tables, and hopefully all the dual boot problems
will go away shortly.

I would like to emphasize that this is a major change to libparted
(about 3000 lines of diff), so there are probably going to be bugs in
this patch.  That said, I think it is important that this change becomes
available quickly.  So, I hope distro people will be testing this lots,
and trying to get it into their releases...

I'd also like to thank everyone who contributed to the discussion
leading to these changes (including Szaka, Patrick, Andries, John
Gilmore, Steffen Winterfeldt - but I probably missed many people)

Changes since 1.6.11:
* include/parted/device.h (PedDevice): replaced sectors, heads, cylinders
  with hw_geom and bios_geom.
* libparted/disk_dos.c: rewrote to use better heuristics and have a more
  "subjective" view of CHS geometry.  (i.e. each partition's "opinion"
  may differ now)
* configure.in parted/Makefile.am: fixed linker invocation.  Rumored
  to fix ppc64 build issues.  Sent by Jeremy Katz <address@hidden>.
* libparted/disk_dos.c (read_table): big cleanup
* libparted/disk_dos.c (read_table, process_bad_chs): now probes
  Microsoft file systems for BIOS CHS geometry.  This idea was suggested
  by Steffen Winterfeldt <address@hidden>.
* libparted/disk_dvh.c: some cleanups and change to fill in all fields
  in the header from Eric Sandeen (address@hidden)

Cheers,
Andrew