[parted-devel] Copyright assignment form for parted

[Phil Susi]

On 9/22/2015 5:58 PM, Al Dunsmuir wrote:
> Amazing how dropping a word or phrase can make a difference 8^)
> 
> I meant that programs such as GParted, parted, blivet-gui and Anaconda
> _currently_  see  the mac volume "Apple_partition_map" partition as an
> anonymous partition with no label, flags or filesystem type.
> 
> GParted  shows  this  as  "unknown"  and  allows the user to delete or
> reformat that partition - which ruins the day of all active partitions
> on  that  mac volume. Fedora's Anaconda/blivit/etc currently allow the
> same shot to the foot. When installing (or updating) Linux on a system
> where  you  want  to  dual  boot with an existing OS/X partition, that
> anonymous  partition  presents  a tempting target for deletion to make
> more free space.

I've actually been wondering why the partition shows up at all.  I'm
thinking the right thing to do here is to map it with a metadata
partition so that the space is claimed and can not be used to create
another partition, but doesn't show up like a normal partition that you
could delete or format.

I wonder.. when you do a normal boot having not recently touched the
partition table with parted or other tools, does the apple partition map
partition show up as /dev/sdxx?  If parted were to treat it as a
metadata partition, then it would not create that mapping.  It seems
like this mapping shouldn't be there since it isn't supposed to contain
a filesystem, but I'm curious if the kernel already hides it or not.

This will probably break gparted because I'm pretty sure that it makes
assumptions about where it can put a new partition and asks libparted to
place it *exactly* there, which will fail if it tries to use the space
claimed by the partition map partition.  I'll have to think a bit on how
to fix that.