[parted-devel] Parted on GNU Hurd based systems

[David Cantrell]

On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 18:07 +0100, Jim Meyering wrote:
> "Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray" <debarshi.ray at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> >> > But 'struct fdasd_anchor' is a struct defined in include/parted/fdasd.h.
> >
> >> Then I wonder why there was such an #if directive in the first place.
> >> Maybe some of the types used in that struct definition are s390-specific?
> >
> > I will look into it.
> >
> >> BTW, what is your goal in excluding them?
> >> If you insist on excluding them, be sure that you're
> >> not also excluding them from the distribution tarball (the one
> >> created by "make dist" run on an x86 Linux system) -- unless
> >> that is the intent, in which case I'd say you should just remove
> >> them altogether.
> >
> > I just do not want to install the headers on a system which does not
> > have __s390__ or __s390x__ defined, since the associated functions
> > would not be compiled into the library.
> 
> This comes back to the question of why there are such #ifdefs
> in the first place.  Unless there is a compelling reason,
> a libparted installation on an s390 should provide the very
> same header files as everywhere else.
> 
> [Note that I lack background on this, so if something
>  I'm saying doesn't make sense, that's probably why :-) ]
> 
> Shouldn't it be possible operate on s390-oriented images
> from other systems?  It would be useful if only to ensure that
> we can test the affected code without having s390 hardware handy.

The zSeries support in libparted is Linux-specific.  DASD is not like a
normal block device that we are all used to.  It's not possible to work
with a DASD image because you can't really have one.  DASD is
variable-length record-based storage rather than block-based storage.

Mainframes are special.

-- 
David Cantrell <dcantrell at redhat.com>
Red Hat / Westford, MA
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