how did you make it with the (still) broken cfdisk

[Stelios Parnassidis <stel@ikaria.camelot.de>]

It is my second week after having started with debian. I wanted to
taste what's it is like to have a 'stable' system running...

Anyway it's anything but stable but i'm still fighting.

I have also wondered from the very beginning, after having
carefully swallowed the install.html, how im heaven can
poeple go on with the first very important tool broken: cfdisk.

A big warning was there about my last chance to backup/ first
to sweep out my disk.

I had already partitioned the 3.1MB of the fireball, so i needed
only to change the type of a partition to swap. But the
install menu wanted then to patition the whole disk again.
Ok, i had to make it without swap.

Some days later i found my way to bug report system, for which
i can only express my respect. If only the maintainers would
do respectively serious work. I found the answer there but don't
know yet how to put it in the packaging system.

Sometime  last November was a hint to repair the bug in cfdisk:

 Subject: Re: Bug#5466: cfdisk is broken for disks >4GB

	Solution: just as for fdisk:

	On every call to ext2_llseek, cast the sector number to ext2_loff_t

And then:

        Fixed in 2.5-8.

So i found the fix in util-linux_2.5-8.diff.gz and  util-linux_2.5-9.diff.gz
which are what i have found to be the latest rex-fixed release.

in file cfdsik.c:

  void read_sector(char *buffer, int sect_num)
  {
 -    if (ext2_llseek(fd, sect_num*SECTOR_SIZE, SEEK_SET) < 0)
 +    if (ext2_llseek(fd, (ext2_loff_t)(sect_num*SECTOR_SIZE), SEEK_SET) < 0)

and

  void write_sector(char *buffer, int sect_num)
  {
 -    if (ext2_llseek(fd, sect_num*SECTOR_SIZE, SEEK_SET) < 0)
 +    if (ext2_llseek(fd, (ext2_loff_t)(sect_num*SECTOR_SIZE), SEEK_SET) < 0)
         fatal(BAD_SEEK);
 

Of course for the cast it is too late:
	the first suggestion was meaning : (ext2_loff_t)sect_num*SECTOR_SIZE


Well, i mean cfdisk is not a tooly. cfdisk should have been exaustively checked
before released.

Together with some other similar missings, this broke my hope i could rely on
the famous rocky solid debian. 

RedHat has aldready lost my confidence. So i see i shall keep on with my own
hybrid installations (old good slackware, sigh :( ).

For the end, i have a lot of respect and thank for all the guys out there, neverthe-
less i would like to remind that ten thousands of innocent users out there
are also a part of the process. ... 


Stelios Parnassidis <stel@ikaria.camelot.de>
Kapuzinerstr. 8, 80337 Muenchen, Germany, Tel. +49-089-7211505