There will have to be different levels of modules for target media
preperation, here are some possible modules, im not suggesting we need
them all, just exporing options

Some functionality provided by these modules could be also used in
acquisition of packages from a local filesystem


1) Hardware detection of possible targets to install to.
        Detect all drives, removable drives etc. could be split from libdetect
or a custom job based on kernel detection from dmesg, or devfs.

2) Partition preperation
        Functionality
                detect
                create
                delete
                resize?

        Different partition types
                acorn   
                amiga   : libfdisk  
                atari   : libfdisk
                ibm
                mac     : libfdisk, libparted   
                msdos   : libfdisk, libparted
                osf     : libfdisk
                pc98?   : libparted
                sgi
                sun     : libfdisk
                ultrix

        Special partition types
                loop    : libparted
                ramfs
                md (raid)
                lvm     

        There is no one tool that can do the job here, modules could be based
on debians libfdisk, parted, other fdisk style programs, individual
tools will likely be required to deal with any md or lvm partitions.
        Possible use of parted was discussed some time ago, i looked at the
code recently, and it has a good structure and could be split into small
modules pretty easily i think. Previously it was mentioned that parted
had problems running on non-i386 platforms, i read that it now works on
big-endian machines (not sure what means in practice).

3) Filesystem preperation

        Ext2
        Fat
        HFS
        Minix
        NTFS
        ReiserFS
        Swap



It will take a bit of organising to get this area working smoothly, but
i think the modular way we are aproaching it should work well, probably
the biggest area of concern is co-ordination user input with the various
seperate modules.


Glenn


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