[Parted-maintainers] Bug#905144: parted: useless warning and error when working with image file

[Lukas F. Hartmann]

Package: parted
Version: 3.2-21+b1
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***

   * What led up to the situation?

I'm trying to make a script that creates a system image with partitions.
As I'm working with an image file, I do not need root permissions. But every
start of parted makes it complain:

sh: 1: dmidecode: not found
WARNING: You are not superuser.  Watch out for permissions.

Example invocation:

dd if=/dev/zero of=reform-system.img bs=1M count=8000
/sbin/parted reform-system.img mklabel gpt

   * What outcome did you expect instead?

I find it unusual for a unix/linux command to complain preemptively about
not having root permissions, especially if they are not necessary.
Parted should also not try to use dmidecode if dealing with a file, IMHO.

*** End of the template - remove these template lines ***


-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: armhf, i386

Kernel: Linux 4.16.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages parted depends on:
ii  libc6         2.27-3
ii  libparted2    3.2-21+b1
ii  libreadline7  7.0-3
ii  libtinfo6     6.1+20180210-4

parted recommends no packages.

Versions of packages parted suggests:
pn  parted-doc  <none>

-- no debconf information