Teaching hal about format/fsck/label changing

[David Zeuthen]

Hi,

(Note, the spec appear to have moved to

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/PartitionManagement

since Martin posted this message)

On Tue, 2007-11-13 at 16:57 +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
> What do you think about this? I'd like to get a general agreement
> about the design before I start hacking, to make sure that the
> improvements can be adopted upstream without problems.

Sorry for the lag. I think this could be a small and self-contained
addition to HAL. 

About fsck, do you expect to run this unattended? My thoughts about this
was to make the caller pass the address of UNIX socket (or pass some
fd's out of band) and then the helper would connect stdout/stdin/stderr
and we could then do interactive fsck in the UI (I think Mac OS X's disk
utility does this). Then again, this approach sounds a bit dangerous; I
mean, potentially you escape and get root. Then again, interactive fsck
could require the admin password.

For the other use cases (partitioning, formatting) I hope we can solve
that once and for all with the next major release / rewrite of HAL [1]
and make sure it's easy to port the helpers to this new (yet undefined
and unwritten) framework.

     David

[1] : cf. my earlier messages today and yesterday to the list which
seemed to have caused some concerns (but that was expected)