[Parted-edge] VFS layer

[David Cantrell]

On Fri, 2007-02-23 at 01:23 +0530, Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray wrote:
> http://parted.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/wiki/PlanningEdge
> 
> This is about the VFS layer we are planning for Parted 2.0. I find that the
> current libparted code already has the foundations of a VFS infrastructure. The
> PedFileSystem, PedFileSystemType, PedPartition, PedPartitionType, etc.
> structures and enumerators abstract away the implementation details of every
> file system, file system type, partition, partition-type, etc. respectively.
> However we do not have an API to retrieve or modify the information kept in
> these structures.
> 
> Such a set-up works as long as the underlying structures are simple and not
> changing too often. It becomes very cumbersome when one wants to access some
> information that is kept in the "void *type_specific" or "void *disk_specific"
> part of these structures, because the format of these fields are dependent on
> the underlying file system or disk label. The 'volume name' is an example of
> one such piece of information.
> 
> Therefore what I think is that we need to write API functions to complete this
> existing VFS layer, and do it in such a way that we can use externally
> available libraries too.
> 
> I am afraid that most of this might already be obvious to you, but this would
> help me to shed any misconceptions I might be having.

This is the right track to me.  I think some confusion was introduced
during discussions a while back (probably my fault).

Extending the API to be more complete is one major task.  The other
major task is to remove the in-library code that handles filesystems and
instead use the libraries provided by those projects.  This will prove
more difficult, but not completely impossible.  Each filesystem is
probably enough work for one developer to tackle.

-- 
David Cantrell <dcantrell at redhat.com>
Red Hat / Westford, MA
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