Hello Tzafrir Cohen. Thanks for your bug report.
On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 11:44:09AM +0200, Tzafrir Cohen wrote: > Package: util-linux > Version: 2.27.1-1 > Severity: wishlist > > Dear Maintainer, > > The sfdisk man page documents using --dump to dump partitions of a > system and later restore them by feeding them to sfdisk from the > standard input. > > The format of this dump has changed in the rewrite in version 2.26, and > thus a dump generated by Stretch cannot be used by Jessie. > > New versions seem to be able to use old dumps. > > A simple cwscript I use here to convert new format to old: > > sed \ > -e 's/type=/Id=/' \ > -e '/^label:/d' \ > -e '/^label-id:/d' \ > -e '/^device:/d' \ > # > > Is dumping and restoring accross versions supported? I'm not sure what the "official" answer is (I'd recommend you ask on the upstream mailing list!), but you seem to pretty much confirm my theoretical idea of what would be supported with the new implementation... basically that the newer dumps can not be used on older version because they dump out more functionality (in a way that I did not see how it could be compatible with the old tools). Using old dumps should work though as that's just a subset of the newer tools functionality. Thanks for confirming my theory by actually testing it! (Bonus points for your instructions on how to make the dump compatible with old version that might be useful for someone running into the same issue and finding this bug report!) Not sure what exactly you're wishing for in this bug report though. Possibly upstream could be convinced to include some kind of "dump in compatibility mode" (ie. only a subset of functionality will be restored when restoring such a dump, but it'll be possible to use it with older versions of sfdisk). If so this sounds useful to you, then please bring it up for discussion on the upstream mailing list as it's out of scope for Debian. If you have some other take on what you're wishing for, please mention explicit details. Regards, Andreas Henriksson
