Re: geomman

On Tuesday, August 19th, 2025 at 23:03, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 4:19 PM Braulio Rivas <brauliorivas@protonmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hello everyone!
> > 
> > I want to show geomman, a TUI that allows creating partitions and file systems (for the moment: UFS, EXT2, 3, 4, FAT16, 32, exFAT, and NTFS). I've been working on this for the last few months, and with the help of Robert Clausecker and Alfonso Siciliano, we have now published a port.
> > 
> > The port is available on FreshPorts [1]
> > 
> > I would like everyone to give it a try. It is based on sade [2] (the same tool in the FreeBSD installer). So I extended sade and added new features like copying/pasting partitions, labeling new partitions through glabel, and creating more file system types. If you have any questions, you can read the README.md [3].
> 
> 
> Can you do the same with gpt or ufs labels? Glabel is dangerous since once you label a partition, you can only reference it through the label safely. Glabel creates a new device/partition that's a little smaller than the original. The old contents can be corrupted and weird things happen when you newfs on the original device. Swap with glabel can confuse crash dumps. And a few other weird edge cases (so it mostly works, but unpredictablely fails).

Not for the moment, but it is planned to add labels using GPT labels or the file system's own method. I already have the UI set up to add these labels, so it would be only a matter of implementation.

> I'd suggest this tool at least warn that there be dragons around glabel that aren't there for diskid, gpt or ufs label or any other fs based label.

You are right, it is important to warn users. I'll add this to future releases. Thanks for your feedback!

> > Any question, issue, bug, feature request, or feedback is more than welcome! Please don't second-guess, and you may open an issue on the repo [4], send an email to [5] or [6], or jump into geomman's IRC (libera.chat) server #freebsd-geomman [7] (choose whatever you want).
> > 
> > We'll continue adding more features (like complete ZFS handling).
> > 
> > This work is sponsored by Google through Google Summer of Code [8].
> 
> 
> I'll have to give it a spin.
> 
> Warner
> 
> 
> 
> > IBest,
> > Braulio Rivas
> > 
> > [1] https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/geomman
> > [2] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?sade
> > [3] https://gitlab.com/brauliorivas/geomman/-/blob/main/README.md?ref_type=heads
> > [4] https://gitlab.com/brauliorivas/geomman
> > [5] fuz@FreeBSD.org
> > [6] brauliorivas@FreeBSD.org
> > [7] ircs://irc.libera.chat/freebsd-geomman
> > [8] https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/projects/AQdl28ee