Package: partman-base Version: 162 Severity: wishlist parted 3.x removes most of the ped_file_system_* entry points that required extensive copies of file system code in libparted, with the exception of some limited support for HFS+ and FAT resizing (see its NEWS file for more details; facilities such as file system probing are still available). d-i still uses these for important functions. In most cases we fall back to external utilities, but if there are any remaining places where we don't then we'll need to fix those.
However, simply falling back to external utilities is not a functionally-equivalent option right now, because in general we have no support for handling progress information from those utilities. Most of them have some kind of progress interface, usually requiring some special option and designed for human consumption rather than machine parsing. Rather than the Sisyphean task of giving all the appropriate utilities machine-parseable progress interface, I instead suggest that we study the current progress interfaces and try to identify some common factors that can be parsed heuristically (e.g. solid bar of characters; "\-/|"-style spinner; percentage output), and write a wrapper utility that can translate some of the common ones into debconf progress output. I think this ought to be a single program in partman-base, since there are only so many ways people have invented for console progress interfaces and we don't want to keep reinventing the wheel. We can then use that to wrap various mkfs, resize, etc. utilities, and in the process fix some ancient bugs about lack of progress feedback in various operations since some cases haven't actually used libparted's file system support for a while. The relevant parted_server commands to grep for in various partman-* modules for ideas on the kinds of utilities that need to be wrapped are: CREATE_FILE_SYSTEM CHECK_FILE_SYSTEM RESIZE_PARTITION (Theoretically also COPY_PARTITION but we have no fallback for that; we may have to either desupport this or reimplement it by hand somehow.) I looked at doing this once but unfortunately I seem to have lost the source code for my attempt; I'd only really made a start at it anyway. I'm filing this bug as a memory aid, and because people keep asking me what's happening with packaging of parted 3.x and I want to have something reasonably coherent to point them to. -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
