[parted-devel] partition ordering in parted

[Andrew Gaffney]

[If you get this twice, don't kill me. I sent the first one 5.5 hours ago, and I 
haven't seen it hit the list, yet. There was also a ~30 minute delay in my local 
postfix server delivering it to lists.alioth.debian.org, which tells me there's 
something up with the mail server.]

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