debinst: target media preperation
There will have to be different levels of modules for target media
preperation, here are some possible modules, im not suggesting we need
them all, just exporing options
Some functionality provided by these modules could be also used in
acquisition of packages from a local filesystem
1) Hardware detection of possible targets to install to.
Detect all drives, removable drives etc. could be split from libdetect
or a custom job based on kernel detection from dmesg, or devfs.
2) Partition preperation
Functionality
detect
create
delete
resize?
Different partition types
acorn
amiga : libfdisk
atari : libfdisk
ibm
mac : libfdisk, libparted
msdos : libfdisk, libparted
osf : libfdisk
pc98? : libparted
sgi
sun : libfdisk
ultrix
Special partition types
loop : libparted
ramfs
md (raid)
lvm
There is no one tool that can do the job here, modules could be based
on debians libfdisk, parted, other fdisk style programs, individual
tools will likely be required to deal with any md or lvm partitions.
Possible use of parted was discussed some time ago, i looked at the
code recently, and it has a good structure and could be split into small
modules pretty easily i think. Previously it was mentioned that parted
had problems running on non-i386 platforms, i read that it now works on
big-endian machines (not sure what means in practice).
3) Filesystem preperation
Ext2
Fat
HFS
Minix
NTFS
ReiserFS
Swap
It will take a bit of organising to get this area working smoothly, but
i think the modular way we are aproaching it should work well, probably
the biggest area of concern is co-ordination user input with the various
seperate modules.
Glenn
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