[parted-devel] [PATCH][RFC] Print maximum size of GPT

[Brian C. Lane]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 10:48:53AM +0100, Anna Maresova wrote:
> > > Wow, so you're using > 128 partitions?
> > 
> > I wonder about that as well.  Also how does printing the number help?
> 
> No, this got to me when the installation of our distribution failed on one
> particular ARM machine with "Error: Too many primary partitions" - not really
> helpful message even for figuring out what went wrong. Maximum size was 15 in
> this case and knowing the number would help our installer to deal with the
> situation. But I can work it around somehow, of course.
> 
> > > Thanks for the patch, but it would break anything parsing the output,
> > > and for something as unusual as this I don't think we want to do that.
> > 
> > Anything parsing the output should be parsing the machine parsable
> > version, where new fields can be added at the end without breaking
> > existing parsers.
> 
> This is what I was hoping for.

I wouldn't count on it :) Since the format hasn't changed in recent
memory I expect that there would be breakage. I'm not totally against
expanding it, but I don't think this is urgent enough to do that. The
default partition limits for the disklabels are pretty well known, and
in general parted doesn't have a way to report limits. It might be nice
to add a new command to do that at some point.

Brian

-- 
Brian C. Lane (PST8PDT) - weldr.io - lorax - parted - pykickstart