Re: Dropping old fdisk utilities
Hello Stan!
On 09/23/2017 06:18 PM, Mac User wrote:
> It's not really helpful to call people lazy.
I'm pretty sure it's the right term to use in this context. If the world
moves on and you are unwilling to adopt, I'd say it's fair to call you
lazy.
> Partitioning disks is not an everyday occurrence for a typical user.
Right. That's why you shouldn't be using a tool which is unmaintained
in Debian and most likely dead upstream. You should rather use something
which is commonly used, has widely available documentation, like in the
Arch wiki [1], and is actively maintained upstream and within most
distributions.
> For years, pdisk on Mac OS (and NetBSD) was the best command-line
> partitioning tool by far for APM disks.
The emphasis here lies on "was", it no longer is. As I said before,
the world has moved on.
> It's really quite frustrating to be installing a new GNU/Linux
> distribution (on mac68k or macppc) and be presented with only a graphical
> choice of partitioner, or some other choice that the maintainers think I
> should be using because it's "easier". Any tool is only "easy" once you
> know how to use it.
You know what's even more frustrating. Users making uninformed statements
like yours which is claiming that parted is a tool which comes with a
GUI by default, it isn't. GNU parted is a command line utility and always
will be. You are confusing it with GParted which is the optional GUI that
can be used with parted, but doesn't have to.
> If something no longer works, then by all means get rid of it or fix it,
> but don't blame users for wanting to continue with what they're used to.
Well, that's exactly what I want to do: Getting rid of old and unmaintained
stuff if no one is willing to fix all the issues.
People like you seem to forget that free software doesn't mean people's
time and efforts are free. While I have no problem with working on these
things, it's always frustrating when users do not realize that software
doesn't maintain itself but rather costs time and efforts of the people
involved with it.
The proper reaction from your side should rather be to offer help with
the maintenance or even step up to become the maintainer of said tool
if you think that it is of particular importance to you. The nice thing
about free software and especially Debian is that that's exactly what
you can do and no one is keeping you back from doing so.
I have fixed some issues with mac-fdisk and I have uploaded the updated
package now which is currently stuck in NEW. But I am not really interested
to work on this package in the long term, simply because there has been
a much better alternative with parted around for quite some time now
and I even helped getting Atari partition table support into parted [2]
so that even on Atari we don't have to rely on atari-fdisk anymore (which
also wouldn't work with debian-installer FWIW).
Adrian
> [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNU_Parted
> [2] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parted.git/commit/?id=9c266205416ec956d6205c828211480de3767d02
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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