[parted-devel] Proposal: Rewrite of Parted UI

[David Cantrell]

Debarshi Ray wrote:
>> Hi. I would like to re-suggest libgnt for this
> 
> I find libgnt and gntparted very interesting indeed. However I would
> like to know how different is it from cfdisk? As far as I understand,
> cfdisk is nothing but an ncurses based fronted to libparted, and so
> are the other programs which are a part of GNU Fdisk. Although both
> parted and gfdisk provide a Bash front-end to libparted, both are
> different in the type of interface they provide. One is the native
> Parted type user interface, while the other offers a more Linux Fdisk
> like user interface making it transparent to new users of libparted.
> Hence having both of them are necessary.
> 
> However I have a feeling that it would be redundant to have both
> gntparted and cfdisk. The reason being that both are ultimately using
> some textmode window environment to provide a front-end. If libgnt is
> a wrapper for ncurses, which provides widgets, then it would make good
> sense to re-write cfdisk using libgnt, or replace cfdisk with
> gntparted. Since the GNU Fdisk family is not as widely used as GNU
> Parted, it would not cause much of a problem. At the end of it all, we
> can attract more users and developers to cfdisk because of the
> ease-of-use injected by libgnt.

A frontend using libgnt is a good candidate for an external 
libparted-requiring program, like GNU fdisk.  I have no problems with 
this, but the basic frontend in parted should remain fairly simple and 
not require many external libraries.

-- 
David Cantrell
Red Hat / Westford, MA