Re: Dropping old fdisk utilities
On Wed, 20 Sep 2017, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Since parted fully supports partitioning of all typical partition types
> on m68k machines - amiga, atari, mac - I would be in favor of removing
> the old fdisk packages.
>
> mac-fdisk in particular is no longer needed but it can cause trouble
> with debian-installer when the udebs are outdated or broken.
>
If the package gets broken and if no-one will maintain it, then I won't
object to its removal. Otherwise, why not cross that bridge when we come
to it? I'm willing to fix more mac-fdisk bugs if need be. What is needed
to keep up with changes in APT?
> While amiga-fdisk is not used in debian-installer, we actually don't
> need it either. parted works just fine for partitioning Amiga hard
> disks.
>
> So, I would be in favor of removing both amiga-fdisk and mac-fdisk.
>
> Opinions?
>
I can say that one advantage of mac-fdisk over the other tools is that it
works the same as pdisk on Mac OS X. So the risk of catastrophic operator
error is reduced. Though it appears that the mac-fdisk code hasn't tracked
Apple's pdisk code. Is there a licensing issue?
There is a risk that some quirks in the APM format, Mac OS, or Apple boot
ROMs are not handled by other tools. I don't know. And I don't know that
parted developers intend to match pdisk functionality in general. Given
those uncertainties, I can't offer an informed opinion.
--
> Adrian
>
>
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