Re: Bug#512740: Sparc disk labels broken on LDOM and Parallel installs

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

Source: parted
Source-Version: 2.2-1

(Note that this is still in NEW, and is currently targeted at
experimental but we plan to move it to unstable soon; I'm
version-closing it while I remember.)

On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 06:54:39PM +0100, Frans Pop wrote:
> I've read through the patch, but must admit I don't understand it. What 
> seems to be missing is *how* exactly it fixes the problem.
> 
> And somehow I doubt this patch stands on its own. I would think that it is 
> a requirement for patches in other packages (such as partman). If that is 
> true, then testing the patch in isolation is not much use (as applying it 
> on its own would not fix the reported issue anyway).
> 
> Also, I question the definition of (unused?) tags for usr, var, home etc. 
> What's the purpose of that? How's that supposed to be used? Does it mean 
> you're not allowed to put e.g. /srv on a separate partition as there's no 
> tag for it?

In all honesty, the only reason I hadn't dropped this patch from Ubuntu
long ago was that I felt I'd have had to sit there and try to understand
it otherwise.  It definitely modified far more than it needed to in
order to get the job done, and as far as I know the original authors
never sent it upstream.

I'm not aware of any partman changes that were associated with this
change in Ubuntu.

Anyway, the patch non-trivially failed to apply on top of parted 2.2-1,
which forced the issue a bit, so I went and looked at it in more detail
than I had done previously, starting by stripping out non-essential
parts of the patch (renamed structures, added #defines, etc.).  It
turned out that there was nothing left!  The actual important part of
this change was applied upstream in 2.2, with this NEWS entry:

  sun: the version, sanity and nparts VTOC fields were ignored by libparted.
  Those fields are properly initialized now. The nparts (number of partitions)
  field is initialized to 8 (max. number of sun partitions) rather that to a
  real number of partitions. This solution is compatible with Linux kernel
  and Linux fdisk.

Thus I've dropped this patch from Ubuntu, with some relief, and we can
consider it fixed in Debian once parted 2.2-1 lands.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]