[arch-general] [arch-releng] Default Bootloader for AIF

[Dieter Plaetinck]

On Sun, 27 Mar 2011 17:06:57 -0400
David Campbell <davekong at archlinux.us> wrote:

> Excerpts from Dieter Plaetinck's message of 2011-03-27 10:01:35 -0400:
> > If I want to support GPT I will need decent utilities from upstream.
> > I know about parted and sgdisk but I need a toolset for:
> > - interactive partitioning
> 
> Because I was not too happy with doing interactive partitioning
> with parted, I started a project [cparted][1]. I thought it was
> going to be ready for use soon, but then realized it has some
> issues (alignment wrong, fixing alignment had other unwanted side
> effects), and am not sure how soon they will be fixed. But this
> brings up a couple questions. If cparted is in good working
> order, would it be considered for use with AIF?

Maybe, if the project has become really big.
For stuff like this I really would like a reliable upstream which I can
trust will produce high-quality software. We're talking about tricky
and important stuff which is hard to debug.  And we're talking about
stuff that every distribution needs, so I'm inclined to wait for a
solution supported by the kernel guys (i.e. something in util-linux
would be nice)

> Is having Python and [pyparted][2] as dependencies OK?
I would try hard to avoid python.
There were times I wished I wrote aif in python (then it obviously be
okay), but at this point I would rather just depend on some commonly
available binary programs.

> > - scripted partitioning (for auto-installs)
> 
> You can run parted in --script mode.

Hmm, and does it have a proper UI in ncurses or something? to replace
cfdisk in aif?
I know about the newt-based nparted but I'm told it's badly maintained.

Dieter