svn commit: r258686 - head/sbin/fdisk

[Juli Mallett]

On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 11:00 PM, Gleb Smirnoff <glebius at freebsd.org> wrote:

>   Juli,
>
> On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 05:59:14PM +0000, Juli Mallett wrote:
> J> Author: jmallett
> J> Date: Wed Nov 27 17:59:13 2013
> J> New Revision: 258686
> J> URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/258686
> J>
> J> Log:
> J>   Fix fdisk(8) to create 2TB partitions on disks larger than 2TB,
> rather than
> J>   only being able to create 1TB partitions:
> J>   o) Use an unsigned 32-bit quantity to store the number of disk
> sectors.
> J>   o) Detect overflow of said 32-bit quantity and clamp to 2^32.
> J>   o) Rather than returning the disk sector count from get_params,
> return 0 on
> J>      success, since its return value is only ever compared to -1 to
> detect
> J>      failure.  This would cause returning 2^32 sectors to be
> interpreted as an
> J>      error.
> J>
> J>   Reviewed by:       bde ("good for a quick fix")
>
> What is the reason to use fdisk today, instead of gpart?
>

Habit?  Hysterical reasons?  Ease-of-use?  (The fact that I find fdisk(8)
easier to use than gpart(8) is probably a bug in me and not in gpart(8),
but it always takes me too many steps to get things done with gpart(8),
including some manpage reading.)  Being fairly self-contained so that one
can use it in automated systems without worrying about which geom(4)
modules are in the host system's kernel is probably the most-reasonable
version.

If it's so deprecated that leaving bugs in it is desirable, please remove
it from the tree entirely :)

Thanks,
Juli.