[Parted-maintainers] New parted api, and possibility for parted 1.6.x (x>12) in debian/sarge ...

[Sven Luther]

Hello,

We are contemplating moving to parted 1.6.x (x>12) as the parted version used
for sarge, since it provides a better solution to the infamous 2.6 kernel CHS
disaster, more info on this can be found here : 

  http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=108594754632501&w=2

And maybe other places. The RCness of it comes from the possibility of loosing
a possible windows install due to linux and windows not agreeing on the
geometry of the disk anymore. An early backport is included in 1.6.11-x, but
we are at 1.6.19 upstream right now, and supposedly the upstream version
includes better fix for this.

The 1.6.12 parted version includes a API change, and thus a bumping of the
libraries soname. The change came that the old head/sector/cylinder values are
split into a hw_geometry (as read from disk) and a bios_geometry) structure,
which then holds the new CHS values. The idea is that hw_geometry is what is
read from disk, and bios_geometry is what is infered from the bios or existing
dos/windows partitions.

So, i write this email, because libparted-swig-perl, python-parted and
qtparted depend on libparted1.6-0, and thus may need to be fixed and rebuilt.
Since 1.6.12 is released since almost 6 month now, it may well be that a new
upstream release already takes care of these issues.

Could i ask you to investigate the issue, and make all your possible to have a
version which works with the 1.6.19 version currently in experimental uploaded
to experimental, so we can contemplate with more serenity the possible
inclusion of a more recent parted version in unstable, and not maintain a
forked from upstream version for the whole of sarge's lifetime.

Friendly,

Sven Luther