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Fedora To Get a New Partition Manager

Posted by timothy on from the nostalgia-is-a-hard-force-to-overcome dept.

sfcrazy writes Developer Vratislav Podzimek has announced the next-gen partition manager for Fedora, blivet-gui. It is eventually going to replace GParted, the most popular GUI based partition manager, found in all major distros. The new tool is named blivet-gui after the blivet python library (originally Anaconda's storage management and configuration tool). The need of a new partition manager stems from the fact that none of the existing GUI partitioning tools supports all modern storage technologies. Fedora's Anaconda base supports all, though, and is hence chosen as the back-end for this new tool. The application is only a few months old but is already looking nice and useful. Features like RAID and BTRFS support are being worked on. Vojtech Trefny is the other developer working with Vratislav on blivet-gui. Here's the announcement.

6 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. The origin of the term "blivet" by Nimey · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag, i.e. a nasty, dirty situation. It seems to have originated around the 1940s as US military slang.

    --
    Hail Eris, full of mischief...

    E pluribus sanguinem
    1. Re:The origin of the term "blivet" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blivet

      It is a poiuyt, devil's fork or widget, is an undecipherable figure, an optical illusion and an impossible object. It appears to have three cylindrical prongs at one end which then mysteriously transform into two rectangular prongs at the other end.

  2. Re:fuck up your disks with greater ease! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    And aimed at the same audience.

  3. We have a winner! by dbc · · Score: 4, Informative

    "RedHat is also known for having a bad case of Not-Invented-Here as well as wanting more control over a significant piece of their distro."

  4. Re:Why not contribute to gparted? by Burdell · · Score: 5, Informative

    Because (as usual) the summary got it wrong. This is not a partition manager, it is a disk/filesystem manager. Partitions make up one part of that, but it is also intended to manage LVM, RAID, btrfs filesets, etc. I believe it uses the parted library on the backend for partitions.

    This is based on the years-of-development code used in the backend of anaconda, the Fedora/Red Hat installer. The code has been pulled out, split up into a library, and set up for stand-alone use (after install). I believe the intention is that anaconda keeps using the library, but now there will be the same interface during install and afterwards for managing disks and filesystems.

  5. Re: So.... by DrXym · · Score: 3, Informative

    Or similar bullshit by people who think "scripting" languages are appropriate for base system tools. Now you will have python dependency hell every-time you want to do something simple like repartition your disks. Oh, and is that project python 2 or python 3? On and on..

    gparted is a graphical tool for editing partitions and already has a raft of dependencies. One more won't make a difference especially since python is used increasingly in core distributions for scripting instead of bash.

    Secondly, perhaps the reason that gparted is considered a mess is precisely because it mixes up the graphical parts and the low level stuff in one package, a problem compounded because the installer also has its own partition editor. Fedora appears to have written a layer called blivet to abstract out partitioning from the installer GUI and therefore it makes sense that they use it in the desktop also.