Ive been thinking about partitioning, there are lots of compromises with existing tools.
I think it would be more flexible to have a cleaner sepeartion between existing tools, so the task can be done in more descrete steps. 1) detect devices 2) detect partitions 3) detect filesystems 4) create/modify partitions 5) create/modify filesystems Advatage of breaking it up is that only the needed tools have to be provided. parted does a very good all round job, but it has to be pretty big to support all those features. I hacked up libfdisk and made a small busybox appplet (rdisk, i.e. read disk) that provides a similar output to fdisk -lu <device> e.g. home:/home/bug1/dev/busybox# ./busybox rdisk /dev/hda Disk /dev/hda: 20.5 GB = 40160988 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 63 999936 499936+ 82 Linux swap /dev/hda2 * 999936 1976688 488376 83 Linux native /dev/hda3 1976688 4905936 1464624 83 Linux native /dev/hda4 4905936 40160736 17627400 5 DOS Extended /dev/hda5 4905999 10765440 2929720+ 83 Linux native /dev/hda6 10765503 40160736 14697616+ 83 Linux native fdisk could be used directly, but you have to take the partition creation/modifciate capability with it... and you dont know wether that is needed, or which tool(s) are best used (parted / cfdisk / raidtools / lvm stuff) untill after you see the current state Similar information could be gathered by parsing /proc/partitions, but you dont get the partition type which can be quite usefull for identifying partitions, also it is kernel dependent. What ive done is only experimental, it only detects standard msdos partitions, if its going to be usefull i will have to put a bit of stuff back in. As it is it only adds 4kB to the busybox udeb, a patch is at http://people.debian.org/~bug1/busybox/rdisk.diff It would be pretty trivial to change the format so that it could be more easily parsed or whatever and trivial -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
