partman-auto question: modifying recipes

[Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com>]

I've a system which needs a small (say 5 megs) boot partition at the
beginning of the disk (ext2 revision 0).  I looed at partman-auto
yesterday to see how I can tell it to do the right thing.  Ideally,
I'd just like to use the existing recipes (atomic and home), but add a
boot partition at the beginning.  Each recipe is one file, so I could
either a) overwrite the recipe with my own or b) modify the file and
add the boot partition at the beginning.  Both don't strike me as
particularly beautiful.  I was wondering if it would be possible to
put each recipe into a directory which files for each partition, i.e.
something like:

recipes/
   atomic/
     003_root
     007_swap

Then I could simply add a recipes/atomic/001_boot file with my
partition in it.  Is this a good idea, and can this be done?

Also, partman-auto hardcodes many things, for example:
     perform_recipe: ext2|ext3|linux-swap|fat16|fat32)
     recipes.sh: ext2|ext3|xfs|reiserfs|linux-swap|fat16|fat32)
Shouldn't this be gathered on the fly?

Finally, I also looked at partman-palo... -palo is not considered in
-auto at all, so I guess people using automatic partitions on HPPA
will end up with a partition table that -palo will complain about.
-- 
Martin Michlmayr
tbm@cyrius.com