[parted-devel] next to master; making a beta release soon; plans

[Curtis Gedak]

Jim Meyering wrote:
> Curtis Gedak wrote:
>   
>> GParted uses the library libparted when resizing FAT16/32 file systems.
>>     
>
> Good.  Then I will remove the command-line "resize" option
> and merely leave the library code.
>   
Hi Jim,

After some more thinking (and researching), I believe a better solution 
is available.  My thoughts are that is better to keep the file system 
specific tools together similar to what has been done with with 
e2fsprogs.  In this case dosfstools might have a new fatresize command 
added to the package.

To get to this state the following steps might be taken:

1)  Create a fatresize command

This would involve extracting the FAT16/32 file system resizing code 
from parted and creating a stand alone command.  As you pointed out 
earlier, there is a fatresize project on SourceForge that appears to 
have done this already.  This project has seen recent development 
activity as seen in this link:

http://fatresize.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=fatresize/fatresize;a=summary

Perhaps the fatresize project team might be contacted to confirm if 
their intent is to continue maintaining a stand alone fatresize command 
_IF_ the FAT resizing code is removed from the parted project.


2)  Remove the FAT16/32 file system resizing code from the parted project

This would clean up the parted code to better align with the parted 
project vision (which I believe is to focus on partition editing, and to 
move away from file system manipulation).

My concern with removing the resize command from parted, but leaving the 
resizing code accessible to the parted library, is that it would make it 
more difficult to maintain this code.

The parted project includes many tests to exercise the code, which I 
heartily applaud.  Removing the command line resize command would make 
it more difficult to exercise the library resize code.


3)  Include the fatresize command with the dosfstools project/package.

Recently there has been some activity with the dosfstools package as can 
be seen in the following link:

http://www.daniel-baumann.ch/software/dosfstools/

Perhaps the current maintainer of the dosfstools package could be 
contacted to consider including the fatresize command in the dosfstools 
package.


In conclusion I think a better long term solution would be migrate the 
FAT resize code out of the parted project into it's own project.  To do 
this successfully will require that someone is committed to maintaining 
the fatresize command after the functionality is removed from parted.  
We can hope that this is already happening.  :-)

Regards,
Curtis Gedak