Re: Parted 1.6.12

[Andrew Clausen <clausen@gnu.org>]

On Thu, Sep 02, 2004 at 09:02:20AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> I had some discussion with Steve Langasek, one of debian's release manager,
> about including parted 1.6.12 in sarge. Since parted is ipart of base, and has
> thus been frozen since more or less amonth, this cause problem, and we were
> wondering if your fix could not be backported.
> 
> Steve (vorlon on irc) suggested : 
> 
>   08:45 < vorlon> svenl: it looks to me like the parted bug could be
>   backported w/o ABI breakage by hiding the new geom info in the arch_specific
>   member.
> 
> I have some reservation, given that libparted really has no concept of hidden
> data structures, and mostly exports everything, but i suppose that the two new
> geom stuff could be added at the end of the structure and still keep backward
> compatibility. Not sure though.
> 
> Do you have any insight on this question ? 

I agree that putting stuff in arch_specific is "hiding", and you could
maintain backward compatability using this trick.  It is conceptually
very ugly, and I don't want to do this work myself.  It would be painful
for you Debian people to maintain the Parted package like this
long-term.

To be honest, I don't see why you can't just recompile packages to use
1.6.12.  I doubt there will be any compilation problems.  If there were
any, they would be minor - things like replacing dev->sectors with
dev->bios_geom.sectors.  How many packages are we talking about anyway?

I think this is a time where you need to look at the code and say:
these are really trivially changes, and aren't going to break anything.
I think you should be far more concerned with the possibility of new
bugs in 1.6.12.

Cheers,
Andrew