[Parted-edge] VFS layer

[Anant Narayanan]

Hi David,

<snip>
> 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.

But why would we want to do that? I was of a different opinion: that we
should stop relying on other libraries as far as possible. This might be
selfish in motive because while porting libparted to Darwin, where
libuuid (part of ext2fsprogs) is not available; I'm having to copy-paste
the corresponding libuuid code into the parted codebase. I think this
will be better for other architectures also, since there's now one less
dependency, which is great for our LiveCD consumers.

To summarize, I think we should to be moving towards fewer dependencies
on external libraries rather than using them. In some cases, this isn't
even possible, because we have the best FAT implementation out there,
which I doubt any other library will be able to replace. In cases where
we do find that an external library offers something significantly
better than our in-house implementation, I see no harm in "grafting" the
relevant code-portions into the parted codebase.

Thoughts?

-- 
Anant