[Pardus-devel] Fwd: Re: [Gelistirici] YALI Installer

[Rajeev J Sebastian]

Hello Baris,

Trying to implement the fat32 filesystem, I have a question. Parted
doesnt seem to offer any "dry run" feature like ntfsresize. What is
the best option for implementing the check_resize method ?

Regards,
Rajeev J Sebastian

On 11/30/06, Barış Metin <baris at pardus.org.tr> wrote:
>
> I forgot to cross-post the answer...
>
> ----------  Yönlendirilmiş İleti  ----------
>
> Subject: Re: [Gelistirici] YALI Installer
> Date: 30 Kas 2006 Per 12:45
> From: Barış Metin <baris at pardus.org.tr>
> To: gelistirici at uludag.org.tr
>
> 29 Kas 2006 Çar 22:19 tarihinde, Rajeev J Sebastian şunları yazmıştı:
> > Hello all,
>
> Hello,
>
> > I would like to know some information on architecture of YALI, and
> > also with regard to the partitioning screen. Is there any
> > documentation on pyparted ?
>
> There was a very little/limitted documentation on pyparted and libparted. One
> has to read the source code (mostly the code for libparted) to get an
> understanding of the overall process. At least, that was the case for me. I
> know it's counterproductive as a requirement to start developing but thats
> the only way I know :(.
>
> > It seems that Kubuntu installer is very capable of resizing fat32
> > using the partman (which uses libparted). In that case, is there some
> > reason why it is not included in YALI ?
>
> Basicly there are two steps in partition resizing. The first step is resizing
> the partition, which is filesystem independent and obviously YALI is capable
> of doing it :). The other is filesystem resizing and defined in
> filesystem.py. To support resizing a partition YALI checks
> FileSystem.isResizeable(). If it's positive partition resizing is done
> through the FileSystem implementation (if there is one of course ;).
>
> We can have fat32 partitioning support of course. But one (possibly me or if
> you are a volunteer you ;), has to write a FileSystem implementation for
> fat32 and filesystem.py:get_filesystem(name) should return its instance. This
> is the only need.
>
> We can use partman or using libparted directly is a choice  too. parted is
> capable of resizeing ext2/3, fat and linux-swap (and with an external
> dependency reiserfs), ext3 resizing has restrictions so we choosed not to use
> it. But using libparted for fat32 resize is fine for me.
>
> > Also, Kubuntu partman it seems uses libparted directly for
> > resize/partitioning tasks (other than for ntfs i believe). So, why is
> > it that YALI calls some other commands like mke2fs/resize2fs etc ? (I
> > am asking because I know nothing about pyparted. It actually seems
> > better to use the commands directly, since those would be relatively
> > bug free.)
>
> As I wrote above, the reason is libparted has some limitations. Possibly that
> limitation (resizing ext2/3, geom.start should remain the same) isn't a
> problem for us currently but resize2fs does a good job so we choosed to use
> it instead.
>
> > In my tests, it seems that installing Pardus on a "Free Space" mostly
> > works, but when installing on resized partitions, GRUB installer is
> > not loaded correctly.
>
> Bootloader code has nothing to do with resized partitions. It's possible that
> (by chance) you catched a bug which you could catch an other time without
> using the resizing feature.
>
> > Is there some way to interact with the installer
> > environment in the console during installation ? This way, more tests
> > can be done, especially running the commands manually which are
> > currently run by YALI using os.popen calls.
>
> YALI doesn't has an interface to do that and IMHO it's better to avoid adding
> that kind of code to YALI :). I guess you have something like DCOP/DBUS in
> mind and thinking about it at first seems a big work which doesn't worth the
> effort :).
>
> > Has Pardus devel team instituted some test procedures for testing the
> > installer/partitioner ? It would be nice to know the procedure if it
> > exists, so that I can try those here.
>
> This is the biggest things that bothers me about YALI. Testing it is hard.
> Automated testing of partitioning code is harder, cause its possible to ruin
> your disk while testing. But I'll have (or have to have) a solution I
> hope ;).
>
> > Thank you in advance for this information. I'm apologise if it causes
> > any delays in your work.
>
> No, please ask any questions you may have. This is the longest mail I wrote
> about YALI's internals as far as I remember. It doesn't have a documentation
> (all my fault, I'll do it) to but currently you're the only one interested in
> it. Anyway, its good to spread the knowledge about it ;).
>
> best regards,
> --
> Barış Metin
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> -------------------------------------------------------
>
> --
> Barış Metin
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