Bug#463769: Fails on files (ie disk images)

[Wakko Warner]

martin f krafft wrote:
> also sprach Wakko Warner <wakko at animx.eu.org> [2008.04.11.1802 +0200]:
> > That wasn't the point.  The point was I wasn't able to "examine"
> > the "file". There's absolutely no reason that one has to attach it
> > to a loopback device just to examine the md superblock.
> 
> md is "multi-device". A file is not a device.

Agreed

>  Of course, mdadm
> could work on files,

Yes.  But only in query mode.  I would not expect to actually use the file
as a device w/o loopback.

> it could also implicitly gunzip them and do

Definately not.  AFAIK, there's no way to fetch a specific uncompressed
offset with a .gz file

> character translation and all the like.

Again, definately not.

> But it doesn't, and it
> won't.

Querying is the only thing I was after.  The patch I made makes querying
work.

> Now, at least this is my interpretation. I CC'd upstream and if he
> disagrees, I'll take it all back. Neil, the bug report is at
> http://bugs.debian.org/463769.

The reason I did this was to make sure that "this file" contains an MD
superblock and that I named the file correctly (IE has sdX in the name)

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