[parted-devel] partition ordering in parted

[Andrew Gaffney]

Until libparted provides a facility for sorting partitions by disk order, I'm 
going to have to go ahead and emulate the current behavior in the Gentoo 
Installer. I have a general idea what libparted does with minor numbers, but I'd 
like to get a verification on it.

With msdos disklabels, it seems that if you have 3 primary partitions, and you 
remove the 2nd one, the old 3rd one will still be minor 3. Is this correct? This 
is also only for primary partitions, right? With logicals, "holes" in the 
sequence of minor numbers are filled in? Is everything with a higher minor 
number just dropped down one, or are the minor numbers reworked to be in disk order?

With any other disklabel, is the behavior similar to logicals in a msdos 
disklabel (ignoring partitions such as the whole disk on sun and mips 
disklabels)? Is this behavior likely to change in near future versions of libparted?

The reason this is more difficult for me is the way the Gentoo Installer works. 
You configure *everything* beforehand, and then the entire thing is acted upon. 
This includes partitioning. So, I can't use a lot of the features of libparted 
directly.

-- 
Andrew Gaffney                            http://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/
Gentoo Linux Developer                                   Installer Project