Re: partman, growlight, discoverable partitions, and fun

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2021 at 12:22:18PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 9/28/21 12:13, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > IOW, chill out, nobody's going to kill off partman unless there's
> > something that's *actually* better than partman.
> 
> Just some comments after reading after this [1] because I honestly find it
> unfair the way I am being cornered here.

Yes, and what I'm saying is, I don't think anyone is trying to corner
you here, Nick are just saying "hey here's some cool new tech, what do
people think". The consensus in my reading is that people like it enough
that we might want to see some proof of concept, and then, assuming it
doesn't lack functionality that we don't want to lose and gives us
something new that we do like (e.g., better usability, more features,
etc etc) then we can perhaps replace partman one or more releases down
the line as the default partitioner.

You have some very good arguments against growlight in its *current*
state. That's fine. Just stay on top of things, and perhaps help Nick
out with testing a few of the more exotic features that partman
currently supports? Either through emulators or by giving him access to
real hardware if you can provide it (and given your collection, I
suspect you can ;-) ).

partman is currently being maintained by the d-i team very much in a
drive-by patches manner, but it's not actually seeing development of new
features. If Nick is offering to take over that work by replacing the
parted bits in d-i by his pet project, *and* he's offering to make sure
that we don't lose functionality we actually care about, then I think
that's a good thing? It's just a matter of making sure Nick *knows*
about the important bits, and that they get implemented in whatever we
end up replacing partman with before we actually do so...

-- 
     w@uter.{be,co.za}
wouter@{grep.be,fosdem.org,debian.org}