On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 21:03:38 +0100
Peter Schuller <peter.schuller@infidyne.com> wrote:
> Without having looked at this stuff beyond newfs, it sounds to me like
> the fundamental problem is the lack of a layer of abstraction between
> the on-disk format and the format used for internal processing in the
> tools/kernel.
In general, abstraction layers are a good idea; the trick is getting the
abstraction at just the right level.
Eirik actually started something like this for the installer - replacing
libdisk w/ libdiskng - but it turns out we didn't need it. (The FreeBSD
installer operates standalone, so it needs something like libdisk - but
our installer runs from a fully populated OS environment, so it can just
shell 'fdisk', 'disklabel', 'newfs' et al when it needs those
functions.)
But even though it didn't see action in the installer, such a library
might still be useful for implement the common parts of these utilities,
including the bounds checking and type casting etc that you refer to.
I haven't given the problem much direct pondering, so I'm still unsure
of what I think the appropriate level of abstraction would be... :)
At any rate, if you want to see what exists of libdiskng it's at:
http://www.bsdinstaller.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/installer/src/lib/libdiskng/
....and your newfs patch is committed, thanks!
-Chris