Re: Removing fdisk and bsdlabel (legacy partition tools)

Ed Maste 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.
>
> I would like to disconnect these from the build, and subsequently
> remove them. This is prompted by a recent bsdlabel bug report which
> uncovered a longstanding buffer overflow in that tool. Effort is much
> better focused on contemporary, maintained tools rather than
> investigating issues in deprecated ones. Removing these tools would
> happen in FreeBSD 15 only (no change in 14 or 13).
>
> Code review to disconnect fdisk: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D43575
>
> Note that this effort is limited to these maintenance tools only -
> there is no change to kernel or gpart support for MBR or BSD
> disklablel partitioning. That said, MBR partitioning and BSD
> disklabels are best considered legacy formats and should be avoided
> for new installations, if possible.
>
> If anyone is using fdisk and/or bsdlabel rather than gpart I would
> appreciate knowing what is preventing you from using the contemporary
> tools.

Probably many do, clueless there's a proposal to remove them,
as many wont be tracking lists (I havent been tracking lately, 
focused on moving home, other will have other distractions)

Personaly:
  I run a mix of machines from servers with 14 back through to
  clients with 4.11 http://berklix.com/scanjet/ 

  Some boxes work well, have no benefit from upgrade & no capability
  to support the bloat from 4 to 15 but still very useful in
  heterogenous internal nets.

  Security is moot behind some firewalls, small is beautiful, &
  sometimes essential, eg I plan to hitch another small old toshiba
  libretto in a waterproof box to use parallel port to drive stepper
  motors for a satellite dish.
  
  I master disk images & trees for such old boxes, mounted on more modern
  FreeBSD, but common fdisk is nice on host & target.
  
  I also use fdisk maintained MBR on eg USB sticks on key ring,
  combining rescue & install partitions of new BSD + backup of
  encrypted data, + A DOS slice for export import for non BSD world.

MBR via fdisk is a familiar comfort in a world of variant OS's.
BSD people who've wrestled with weird Linux boot stuff may sypathise
with the idea if retaining familiar fdisk for non latest BSD people.

But if people really espouse tangible benefit to kicking fdisk out of src/, 
I just hope same people first copy fdisk in to ports/ before out of src/

Cheers,
-- 
Julian Stacey.  Arm Ukraine.  Contraception V Global heating & resource wars. 
Gmail & Googlemail Fail http://berklix.org/jhs/mail/#bad