Re: [PATCH] Enhancements to parted's partition table printing

[Patrick Leslie Polzer]

> The following patch implements a few features that I think would help.
> It's a strawman patch in that I'm not very attached to the particular
> details of the implementation,
You should be. Your patch will have greater chances of fast inclusion
(i.e. next version) if your implementation is in good shape, as most of the
committers already have a lot of tasks on their agenda and not particularly
lots of time.

as long as the output format is stable so
> that we don't have to update scripts all the time (the human-readable
> output of parted changed not that long ago, breaking one or two scripts
> in d-i that were unwisely trying to parse it). Anyway, this patch adds
> the following:
> 
>   * A -c/--colons option which causes the 'print' command to output
>     information about each partition in an easily-parseable
>     colon-separated format rather than the default human-friendly style.
This is good as it follows the UNIX commandment of providing
grep(/awk/sed/...)able output. I like it very much. Is this option an option
of the parted binary or the 'print' command? I can't check myself ATM,
sorry.

>   * A new 'print-all' command, which prints information about all
>     devices rather than just the first. This is best used in conjunction
>     with ...
I planned to implement this for next version, it is good you did it :)
However, I think we should not add a new command for it.
See Guillaume's 'print free' addition.

> ... which is much easier to parse and I think provides most of the
> information we generally need in the Debian installer (though perhaps we
> should invent a machine-parseable way to get the geometry and disk label
> type too). What do you think?
See my comments above. But please also note that libparted offers the
functionality needed in installers, so you're developing some kind of
'lazy-man' interface. But I'm not all against that. Lots of people (esp.
smaller, non-professional distributions) will prefer an interface to parted
instead of libparted.
 
I will be ready to provide a detailed patch review for you soon.
Until then you might take a second look at your current implementation.

Best wishes,

Leslie

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