[parted-devel] filesystem-related functions in libparted

[Curtis Gedak]

Hi Lisa,

Responses to questions follow in-line.

On 12-07-27 05:49 AM, Lisa Vitolo wrote:
> I need to implement these two things:
> 1) knowing the minimum size a partition can be resized to (for when 
> there is a filesystem and we don't want to destroy its data);

The minimum size for a partition depends on the minimum size of the file 
system.  The minimum partition size can also be affected by the type of 
alignment used.  For example with modern disk drives, the size of a 
cylinder is 255 heads * 63 sectors per track = 16,065 sectors.  Please 
note that cylinder alignment is used for legacy operating systems, such 
as DOS.  Newer operating systems and disk drives work well with, and 
often default to MiB alignment.

> 2) resizing a partition together with its filesystem, if resizing is 
> supported for that particular filesystem.
> I've read that for resizing a filesystem I need to call directly the 
> filesystem services as you don't support it anymore starting from 
> libparted 3.0, and that's okay.

The resizing capability for FAT16, FAT32, HFS, and HFS+ was 
re-introduced in a separate library with parted 3.1.0.

> For the second task, from what I heard libparted still provides 
> ped_file_system_open and ped_file_system_get_resize_constraint, but it 
> seems I'm not able to access them in my code. I've included the 
> headers parted.h and filesys.h, but I still receive an error from the 
> compiler (not the linker) that it doesn't find them. My version of 
> parted is 3.0-1. What am I missing? :)

I suggest that you start your project using the latest version of 
parted-3.1 (not 3.0-1).
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2012-03/msg00001.html

For an example of how to link with the new libparted-fs-resize library, 
you might look at the GParted source code.  Specifically configure.in, 
and src/Makefile.am.
http://gparted.org

Regards,
Curtis Gedak