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Re: C++ support for the D-I



Hello Xavier,

On Monday 12 December 2005 12:04, Xavier Oswald wrote:
> Since some days, I'm looking for a better partitioning tool for the
> D-I.
>
> My idea was using gparted because he is very nice and friendly and it's
> written in C++/GTK. As I know, C++ libs aren't build in udeb.
>
> So, what do you think about integrating C++ in the D-I or we should
> look about another partitioning tool written in C ?

I have seen fairly strong opposition from some people in the release team 
and d-i against the idea of supporting C++ in udebs. The consensus seems 
to be that C++ libs
- are too heavy for d-i;
- would introduce another load of dependencies further complicating
  d-i release management (which is complex enough as it is).

On the other hand, there is very broad support for graphical (read: more 
user-friendly) partitioning support in d-i. I remember Colin Watson 
suggesting creating cdebconf plugins for specific partitioning tasks. The 
option added this weekend to build plugins out-of-tree should help with 
this.

I think basing the user interaction on gparted is probably a good idea, 
but developing something new (or at least lighter) using the existing d-i 
environment seems a more realistic approach than just packaging gparted.

If you can find a different existing frontend (which should probably also 
use libparted) that can be more easily adapted to the d-i environment, 
that would of course be an alternative approach. However, such a frontend 
would probably still need to be adapted to support selecting mountpoints 
besides only manipulating partitions and formatting filesystems.

I'm afraid I have too little experience with partitioning frontends or 
with C/C++ programming to offer more help or comments than this; the 
above is mostly what I've picked up from others (mainly from comments on 
IRC).

Cheers,
FJP

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