[Parted-edge] Libraries for file-systems

[Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray]

I was looking for the libraries that are available for working with
specific file-systems, in order for us to start working on the VFS.
This what I could come up with:

Ext2/Ext3: Libext2fs from e2fsprogs
(http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/). However as David pointed out,
this has a licensing issue (GPLv2) and can't be used with Parted
(GPLv3+) right now.

ReiserFS: Libreiserfs from progsreiserfs
(http://reiserfs.osdn.org.ua/) as mentioned in the Parted manual.
Progsreiserfs aspires to be an alternative of the reiserfsprogs
(ftp://ftp.namesys.com/pub/reiserfsprogs/) as small and nice frontends
to this library. However the last release is on 10 January, 2003. This
is much earlier than the current reiserfsprogs release.

NTFS: The choice is between libntfs-3g from NTFS-3G
(http://ntfs-3g.org/) and libntfs from Linux-NTFS
(http://www.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php). However, Szabolcs Szakacsits who
has worked on both projects advises us to wrap the NTFS command-line
utilities, which are currently based on Linux-NTFS. He plans to port
the utilities to NTFS-3G in the near future. According to him, trying
to use the NTFS libraries is not advisable since that is going to be
very very complicated, as compared to Vfat or Ext2/Ext3.

As for the other filesystems, I could not find any libraries yet.
GParted directly wraps the utilities (eg., mkfs.xfs, mkfs.jfs, etc.)
to support the operations not provided by Libparted.

What would be the next step forward?

Happy hacking,
Debarshi
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