I noticed today that ped_partition_is_flag_available doesn't work on free "partitions" - it asserts if !ped_partition_is_active (part). This is sort of inconvenient. In particular, and this is how I came across it, it makes it impossible to ask the question "can I create a partition in this free space and use it as an LVM physical volume?" without first asking libparted to create a partition there, which is not necessarily a desirable thing to do.
None of the disklabel implementors of partition_is_flag_available appear to care about the partition at all right now, although I suppose some future implementor might (I've heard rumours that some SPARC systems don't seem to support LVM physical volumes right at the start of the disk, for instance). I can sort of understand why it was done this way: it means that if ped_partition_is_flag_available returns true then you can definitely call ped_partition_set_flag, without having to check first whether the partition is free. I suppose there are probably partitioning frontends that rely on this for correctness, too. Therefore perhaps it needs to be a separate function. Would it be possible to grow an interface that allows asking this question about free space as well as ordinary partitions? It should just need to call the same backend functions. Thanks, -- Colin Watson [[email protected]] _______________________________________________ parted-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/parted-devel
