* On 2018-01-19 at 07:46 GMT, Jim Wiggs wrote:

>    So all is right with the world again.  But I'm still left with one
> question: why on Earth is *parted* not included as part of the SmartOS
> hypervisor image?  The old Solaris format command is spectacularly
> user-unfriendly and always has been.  I can't imagine that parted requires
> so much additional space that it couldn't be included.  Was there any
> particular rationale to not put a better and more user-friendly
> partitioning tool into the OS that runs at the top level and manages the
> hardware?

I had a look at adding parted to our GZ tools set.  The build fails
with:

  configure: error: Unknown or unsupported OS "solaris2.11".  Only "linux", 
"gnu" and "beos" are supported in this version of GNU Parted.

so it doesn't look promising, but I'll see what I can do.

Generally we try to avoid adding software to the GZ unless absolutely
required.  Adding software has at least 4 consequences:

 - Additional builds required in illumos-extra, adding to the build
   times and disk space usage (we keep the tarballs in the repository)
   for everyone building the platform.

 - Larger platform size may mean users have to buy larger capacity USB
   sticks to fit the image.

 - Everything in the GZ is loaded into RAM, so the more it contains
   the less RAM is available for zones.

 - More resources required to monitor the additional software for
   CVEs, updates, etc.

GNU parted is pretty small so it could be argued it wouldn't have much
of an impact, but the principles remain the same.  This is why we
prefer to add software to the GZ tools set, available here:

  https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-illumos/#tools-install

which isn't bound by the same restrictions.

Cheers,

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com


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