parted 1.6.6 with amiga partitioning support.

[Sven L. <sve...@wa...>]

Hello,

I have made ready a new version of parted, this time based on the parted
1.6.6 debian package, with amiga partitioning support.

This is kind of a regression compared to my older packages, since it
contains only the partitioning stuff, but knows nothing about amiga
filesystems. I did this because i plan to commit these changes to both
upstream and the official debian package soon, and then continue working
on the filesystem support (including creation of affs and asfs
partitions).

So, the package are available (including source and powerpc binaries) on :

deb http://people.debian.org/~luther/parted ./

and i would like to have people test them if possible, before i submit
the patch. These include both read and write support, altough i made a
certain number of choices. If you disagree with them, i would be happy
to discuss them.

I was not sure about the RBD_LIMIT, if it included block 16 or not, so
to be conservative, i added it. I reserve at least 256 additional
hardblocks (expanded to fill the last cylinder) and the partition table
limit is artifically set at 128 partitions.

I make sure to not overwrite any of the badblock, filesystem, lseg and
bootblock (a new Amiga OS 4 stuff) lists, but i overwrite the old
partition table. This last one is controversial, since it is possible
for parted to die before it has finished writing the partition blocks
and the corresponding rdb, which should result in a corrupted rdb. That
said, this can only happen if parted fails to write the partition block
to the disk, fails to read the next partition in the internal structure
or you pull the plug on the machine or somethigng such. A more
conservative approach, made possible by having double as many hardblocks
as partitions, is to not erase the old partition table, and write the
new one, and only erase the old partition table once we have written the
rdb. This causes the partition block to move around though, and not
everyone may want this. It is easier and best to simply backup the rdb
before starting to play with it, i feel.

Finally, i have a question concerning the partition DosType of
partitions of the following filesystems :

  - ext3 (i used LNX\1)
  - fat16
  - fat32
  - hfs (MAC\0 ?)
  - jfs
  - ntfs
  - reiserfs
  - sun-ufs
  - hp-ufs
  - xfs

Or maybe i could use one of the UNI\x for some of them, or some kind of
RSV\0 (for reserved) dostype.

What is currently in use for these ?

Also, i don't currently check or fix the checksum of the hardblocks,
which may be a bad idea, but then, i need to find out how to ask for
user feedback in libparted, i still don't master the exception stuff
fully. Ideally if a bad checksum is detected, the user should be
notified and asked to cancel/ignore/repair/repair_all or something such.

Friendly,

Sven Luther