Re: GPT name overflow

[Andrew Clausen]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 01:41:57PM -0700, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> > What does it actually do?  Seg fault?
> 
> No, just the message "Error during translation: Invalid or incomplete
> multibyte or wide character" that I appear to get when I try other
> non-english LANGs.  The problem is that this happens in the default
> (C?) LANG.

That is really strange.

Can you try to write a small program that has the same problem?
Since I can't reproduce it here, it's a rather fruitless excersize
for me to attempt... I can write a small program for you to play with 
if you're feeling lazy...

> > Sure, you could check if it was boot beforehand, but I think it's
> > cleaner with the flags separate.
> 
> OK, as you please, as long as it actually works.

;)

> > Partition types are The Wrong Thing TM IMHO.  They are always a function
> > of something more intuitive/practical (like a boot flag, or lba flag,
> > or the file system type), so it's better to provide an interface for
> > what the types all mean, rather than display them directly.
> 
> Well, my case I need to be able to set an obscure partition ID (Compaq
> Diagnostic = 0x12, but it has an MSDOS filesystem on it).  I suppose I
> could add this in as a flag.  Would you consider adding this into
> parted?

yep :)

> Any ideas on a good flag, "compaq-diag", "diagnostic", other?

it doesn't seem like it's going to have general utility...
(WTF is a diagnostic partition?  does anyone other than
compaq have one?)

So, I'd lean towards compaq-diag.

> > Do you know how to choose the right FAT partition ID?  There are about
> > 30 to choose from...
> 
> Yes, that's pretty ugly, I agree.

And choosing the wrong one can mean data corruption/obliteration.
(Windows loves self-destructing!  Easy for us to laugh....)

> > Anyway, I have no ethical objections to adding an support for
> > playing with IDs directly (not that I see this as useful...
> > the solution to the unknown GUID type problem is to update parted)
> 
> Well, I think the idea behind 16-byte GUID types as opposed to 1-byte
> partition types is that people can randomly create new partition types
> without worrying about conflicts.  Sadly, they would be far better off
> to allow some "name=value" parameters to be stored with each partition
> so you can save more than a single bit of information (or require 2^n
> different GUIDs to store n bits of flags).

Yep.

Andrew