Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

10 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. So.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Fedora is going to replace GParted none of the existing GUI partitioning tools supports all modern storage technologies. Theyre replacing it with blivet-gui which doesnt support features like RAID and BTRFS.

    That hat too tight?

    1. Re:So.... by ysth · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No, we need such a command line tool or possibly library with a command line tool wrapped around it. The GUI is entirely optional and certainly shouldn't be bundled.

    2. Re: So.... by bored · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I considered moderating you, but I think this is really a case of <whine> "C++ is haaardddd, learning it enough to understand how to plug in a new module is going to take me months. Instead I'm going to rewrite it" </whine>

      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..

      Frankly, its fsking stupid and its another sign that redhat is jumping the shark.

      Plus, do you really want to depend on the skills of some "leet" hacker that thinks python is an appropriate tool for this?

    3. Re: So.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      This is a partition editor. It gets run O(1) times on each computer, within an environment that, if python is not supported, it should not be run.

    4. Re: So.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Give it a rest. Someone pissy enough about not having python installed isn't a wuss using a GUI partition tool. You're the fscking stupid one.

    5. Re: So.... by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      In typical open source fashion, their replacing a tool (GParted) that doesn't support a few features they want with a new one that (at least initially) didn't support _any_ features at all because it was written from scratch.

      Why not just fix GParted to add the few missing features instead of writing a completely new too? The new one will of course itself not support all the features GParted had, but instead be chok full of new bugs that will take years to find and fix...

      Why is it that everyone wants to reinvent the wheel instead of using and improving the tools we already have?

      In the typical open source fashion people thinking they're experts will blindly criticise someone's decision without understanding it. How about you start with blivet-gui is not a partition manager and then work onwards from there with your understanding.

      Blivet-gui is a standalone implementation of the storage manager used during the install process. Yes it can partition, and in the true open source fashion it uses another program to do so (parted), but that's a small subset of what they want to use it for which is more like be a one stop shop for all disk management, volume management, and RAID management.

      Please put the pitchfork away.

  2. Why not contribute to gparted? by sayfawa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Instead of making another program, I wonder what was wrong with sharing the code with gparted so that they could incorporate support for more filesystems?

    TFA didn't say if that option had been explored.

    --
    Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
  3. Idiots by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I hate the FOSS mentality sometimes. So much unnecessary reinventing the wheel when all that's need is some enhancement of an existing tool. It seems like it'd make much more sense to take GParted, a very mature, well-supported and proven tool, and extend its feature set to incorporate the "modern technology" they require, rather than create a whole new tool almost from scratch and deal with an unproved base. They can either work with the GParted developers to incorporate these new features, or fork it and do the work themselves.

    Reusing existing tech is supposed to be the whole fucking POINT of FOSS - it's freely available code, take it and use what's already been developed and use it as a base to create something new/better. So many people though want to start from scratch because they believe that their implementation will be better. It's one of the reasons I see so many music players that do 90% of what Winamp can do for example, each player though doing a different 90% than the other. No-one seems to be able to collaborate in FOSS.

  4. Re:Oblig. XKCD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Gee... we haven't seen that one over a thousand times already on Slashdot. Thanks for posting it again. Stay cool!

  5. Anaconda's base supports all? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The only reason that "anaconda's base supports all" is because anaconda, and kickstart tools, have the ability to support '%pre" scripts that allow manual use of hte command line partitioning tools to tune the partitioning as desired, and completely skip anaconda partition. Anaconda has never, and from all signes will never, be able to support all disk management and partitioning tools.

    Since it's a Python based wrapper for the actual system tools used, features can be added. But there will be inevitable mismatches between configurations manageable through anaconda, and configurations manageable through command line tools for new disk and filesystem tools. And anaconda's use in system critical critical tools like kickstart mean that it _must_ be thoroughly tested before updates. This will slow feature addition in a way that gparted, or other tools, need not support.