Bug#696123: partman-base: need progress wrapper for non-libparted-based filesystem operations
On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 10:22:49PM -0500, Phillip Susi wrote:
> Not too long ago I was looking at patching gparted to support this and
> while it did not seem difficult to process the output of the e2fsprogs
> utilities for the progress information, I was wondering why the
> various fs utilities don't already have a flag to generate machine
> readable output... and I think some of the utilities supported this,
> and some did not, even within e2fsprogs.
Quite. Of course we should use it where it exists.
> IIRC, I found that at least some of them already have a flag to write
> output to a specified auxiliary fd to indicate progress, it just
> seemed that a standard needed decided on and implemented in all of them.
This is a complete red herring: we don't need a standard. We invoke
them all independently anyway, so invoking them in different ways and
even handling different styles of output is not a problem. Trying to
invent and enforce a standard just takes you down an unnecessary rathole
of months spent trying to convince maintainers to change their
machine-parseable output, any of whom might point out with good reason
that it's machine-parseable and therefore is not supposed to change
frivolously.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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