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
