Question about custom boot partitions

[Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com>]

There are at least 2 sub-architectures which need a special ext2
partition to boot.  That is, not just an ext2 file system, but an ext2
file system of revision 0 with no extensions (mkfs.ext2 -r 0 -O none).
Now I wonder how to implement this in partman.  As I see it, there are
3 options:

  1. Change the ext2 type to always be revision 0, and then write some
     finish.d scripts which check that boot (or root if there's no
     separate boot) is of ext2.
  2. In addition to having a ext2 type, also have a "traditional ext2"
     type or so, and create finish.d scripts.
  3. Followg partman-palo or -newworld and create, say, a "Cobalt boot
     partition" (for Cobalt machines).  The problem is that 2
     different sub-arches need ext2 -r 0 as boot (MIPS Cobalt, and ARM
     Netwinder), so we'd have 2 virtually identical packages.  (There
     would be some differences, though.  Cobalt requires the boot
     partition to be the _first_ partition while Netwinder doesn't care.)

What's the best approach?
-- 
Martin Michlmayr
tbm@cyrius.com