[parted-devel] Patch: Be more conservative about modifying the disk

[Joel Granados]

Still not in master but will include it in my patch set.  Thx for the patch.!!
----- "Matthew S. Harris" <mharris312 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Any more word on this patch?  It's purely a UI issue; you can't
> automatically fix the problem in all cases, so we need to check with
> the user before potentially doing damage.  I know you're bothered
> that
> a user in this situation may have to tell Parted to ignore the
> problem, but certainly that's better than blindly overwriting the
> user's disk even when the user presses ctrl-c.
> 
> If you don't want to take the change, I won't press any more.
> Obviously the situation doesn't happen often in real life or you
> would
> have heard from more people by now.  I just don't want this fix to
> fall through the cracks if it can save someone else from what I went
> through.
> 
> 
> Matthew
> 
> On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 09:32, Matthew S. Harris
> <mharris312 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 02:47, Joel Granados <jgranado at redhat.com>
> wrote:
> >> You have a point here.  What still bothers me is that the user will
> constantly have to tell parted.  "yes, I know that the gpt table is
> not where its suppose to be, ignore please"
> >
> > I don't have a problem with that at all.  Most users will never see
> > the message.  I was in an apparently unusual situation (since
> nobody
> > else has reported this problem in the past 18 months), and any user
> > would be much happier saying "ignore, please" than digging into the
> > internals of GPT and editing their copy of Parted.
> >
> >> I confess that I could not think of a good solution for this issue
> of the top of my head.  The only thing I could think of is to "fix"
> the position of the table without erasing the previous one.  But then
> you would have problems with the synchronization of the three.  You
> may also have an issue of overlapping lists.
> >
> > Yeah, there's no transparent fix you can apply here; if the other
> OS
> > really sees the partition differently, any writing you do at the
> end
> > of it could corrupt its data.  We just need to fix the UI so that
> the
> > user doesn't get into the situation I was in: Parted says, "the
> > primary GPT table is corrupt," I think "no, it's not, it's a bug in
> > Parted, let me ctrl-c so Parted doesn't try to fix it" ... and then
> > Parted does anyway.
> >
> > The situation is unfortunate, but I think this UI change really
> > doesn't have a downside.
> >
> >
> > Matthew
> >