Re: Removing fdisk and bsdlabel (legacy partition tools)

On 24 Jan 2024, at 12:50, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:

>> On Wed, Jan 24, 2024 at 8:45?AM Ed Maste <emaste@freebsd.org> wrote:
>>
>>> MBR (PC BIOS) partition tables were historically maintained with
>>> fdisk(8), but gpart(8) has long been the preferred method for working
>>> with partition tables of all types. fdisk has been declared as
>>> obsolete in the man page since 2015. Similarly BSD disklabels were
>>> historically maintained with bsdlabel. It does not yet have a
>>> deprecation notice - I have proposed a man page addition in
>>> https://reviews.freebsd.org/D43563.
>
> man page additions are not going to reach the people who may be
> using this.  This should be a gonein(15) added to the binary.
> I also suspect that all of the people doing ufs installs
> are doing so via bsdlabel, not gpart.

I suspect that more ufs installs are done with bsdinstall than with
bsdlabel.  The interactive mode is much easier to use than bsdlabel -e,
where you have to do your own arithmetic.  A couple of wrappers around
bsdinstall could make it a much better replacement for bsdlabel -e, etc.
(No criticism of bsdlabel, but it's so old I don't remember if I wrote
it; I think I did.)  I have a number of test systems using ufs, and I
do my modifications with gpart, which accepts humanized numbers and
does the arithmetic.

		Mike