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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.

5 of 170 comments (clear)

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

    slashdvertisement:

    Blivet: yes
    GParted: no

  2. 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
  3. 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.

  4. 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?

  5. 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?