Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:17:07 -0700
From: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
To: "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@crashcourse.ca>
Cc: Calvin Walton <calvin.walton@gmail.com>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] FILESYSTEMS: Make "advanced partitions" immediately
 unselectable.
Message-Id: <20080729091707.d82b389a.randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
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On Tue, 29 Jul 2008 06:36:09 -0400 (EDT) Robert P. J. Day wrote:

> On Mon, 28 Jul 2008, Randy Dunlap wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:02:20 -0400 Calvin Walton wrote:
> >
> > > On Mon, 2008-07-28 at 14:42 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > > > On Mon, 28 Jul 2008, Randy Dunlap wrote:
> > > > it strikes me that, at least on x86, MSDOS partition support is so
> > > > fundamental that it should take work for someone to turn it *off*.
> > > > perhaps simply have it on by default, and force someone to go under
> > > > "Configure standard kernel features (for small systems)"
> > > > (CONFIG_EMBEDDED) to make it go away?
> > > >
> > > >   seriously, how often is someone going to build a kernel for x86 and
> > > > not need MSDOS partition support?  just curious.
> > > >
> > > > rday
> > >
> > > Naturally, on an architecture other than x86 (e.g. sparc) you'll want to
> > > ensure that the platform's native partitioning format (for sparc,
> > > SUN_PARTITION) is similarly on by default, and difficult to unselect.
> > >
> > > In this case, you could get by perfectly without msdos partitions
> > > enabled (although the default is still to enable them), unless you want
> > > to read a usb key or something.
> > >
> > > This was the point of the original menu, I think - it allowed each
> > > partition type to have a default based on arch, but to hide away the
> > > mess of other types unless you feel like overriding it.
> > >
> > > You'll want to make sure in your patch that arches other than x86 don't
> > > lose their own native partitioning types :)
> >
> > Thanks.  I won't bother pushing the latest patch.  :)
> 
> so, just to be clear, the consensus is to just leave it alone as it's
> more trouble than it's worth to do anything about?

Probably.

I don't see the "if PARTITION_ADVANCED" block as being compatible with the
need to have default partition types per $ARCH.
Do you see some way around that problem?

---
~Randy
Linux Plumbers Conference, 17-19 September 2008, Portland, Oregon USA
http://linuxplumbersconf.org/
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