0.5.9rc2

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2007-03-26 at 13:38 -0700, Dan Nicholson wrote:
> Hey David,
> 
> On 3/26/07, David Zeuthen <david at fubar.dk> wrote:
> >
> > Will do. Note that there is really little point in building with
> > --enable-parted as nothing uses this API just yet. Specifically, the
> > Fedora packages don't use this.
> 
> Not to get sidetracked from the 0.5.9 release, but what ever happened
> with the GNOME app you were writing to use this? I recall some nice
> looking screenshots 

That would be
        
        http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gdu-2.png
        http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gdu-3.png
        http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gdu-4.png
        http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gdu-5.png
        http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gdu-6.png

> for formatting disks, and I believe it was using
> this libparted API. There's also the gformat (gnome-format) project,
> which may just do filesystem formatting and not partitioning.
> 
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/2007-February/msg00001.html
> 
> Your thoughts?

Actually, that utility, GNOME disk utility, was supposed to use methods
on HAL to be able to run unprivileged, work with accessibility and the
full shebang. You just can't do that with linking in libparted. It's
right now nothing more than a nice looking shell is there so I haven't
even bothered to put the code in git or SVN. It should be easy to add
the missing methods in HAL; the bulk of the work is done in HAL's
partutil library (which uses libparted) that Richard mentions.

The good news also is that I have a more GNOME'ish version of
hal-device-manager that includes a rich GNOME-centric library for device
information, that I will announce once 0.5.9 is out. 

The thinking is that, using said library, it's no more than 500-100 LOC
of to build a shell like the one you can see in the GNOME Disk Utility
screenshots. Here's some teaser screenshots of the GNOME Device Manager

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/device-manager-1.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/device-manager-2.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/device-manager-3.png

But more on that later.. along with a ceremonial commit (that will be
televised!) that removes hal-device-manager and all of it's GTK+ and
Python dependencies from the HAL tree. I've been wanting to do that for
years.

     David