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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.

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 Guy+Smiley · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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?

    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?

  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.

    --
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    1. 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.

  3. Re:Damn the GUI! by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yeah, another example of NIH coming from RedHat.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  4. 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.

  5. 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."

  6. Re:What does it support that others don't? by eulernet · · Score: 5, Funny

    slashdvertisement:

    Blivet: yes
    GParted: no

  7. Re:How to know if a component of Linux.. by Nimey · · Score: 5, Funny

    Could be worse: it could have been written by Lennart Poettering.

    --
    Hail Eris, full of mischief...

    E pluribus sanguinem