@AdrianVovk making them, inspecting them, changing them, and more importantly: all the small mostly insignificant features implemented (for partitioning). And that, whether done imperatively, interactively, or scripted.
(as for filesystems, that's another thing, and another tool, and something larger for later... really...)
@samueldr Ah I see. So something like udisks, gnome-disk-utility, parted/fdisk (both as cli and library), and systemd-repart glued together into one big thing?
What do you feel is missing from the existing tools? Maybe they can just be extended to be better, likely for a lot less work on everyone's parts? I ask because I'm certain systemd upstream would be interested in ideas for what to do better in repart - there's a push to make it more generally useful to everyone (esp disk image builders)
@AdrianVovk not the udisks part. Really partitioning, and in a host system-agnostic manner.
I have had a look at many of the existing tools, even contributed to what is currently the best we have all around, but I think there's nothing out there that would help, compared to building from the ground up.
To be fair, I haven't had a look at repart, since it is purpose built to “Grow and add partitions to partition table”.
Anyways, I don't have a plan or anything, other than knowing that all current tools are incomplete, and sometimes wrong in really particularly specific ways. (But mostly good for most use cases!)
@AdrianVovk maybe it'll help get the point across, but the overall pain points I've had in that area is not with real disks, but dealing with producing images, especially when needing obscure features. It would have to comprehensively expose all footguns, and in a way where the UX works well (and yes, as a library, CLI tool, TUI, even GUI, etc...)
@samueldr Well repart's mission does extend to producing disk images nowadays. And the people working on it are really interested in making repart (and mkosi, which uses repart) a generic enough OS image builder that all the distros use it. They've been happy to add what's missing. Perhaps it's worth a look. I probably won't be doing CLI/TUI/GUI stuff any time soon, if ever, though
I was also going to plug genimage but it looks like you already have it starred on GH
@samueldr And I definitely relate to "things are broken enough that it should all just be redone, and it'll be easier than dealing with all the cruft"... Seems like I'm fighting the urge to rework something on the regular, anyway 🙃
If days became 48 hours, I don't know if that would be a blessing or a curse
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