RFC: making gpart default

[Marcel Moolenaar]

On Sep 25, 2008, at 2:45 PM, Peter Wemm wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 2:24 PM, Marcel Moolenaar <xcllnt at mac.com>  
> wrote:
>> On Sep 25, 2008, at 12:46 PM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> [..]
>>> pretty conclusively, but fsck will happily trash a database
>>> stored in partition that previously contained a filesystem,
>>> provided enough magic bits survive near the start.
>>
>> That's why I believe we need to attach real meaning
>> to the partition type. We should disallow a newfs_ufs
>> on a partition that is not of type freebsd-ufs. We
>> should disallow swapon for a partition that is not
>> of type freebsd-swap. etc..
>>
>> With gpart it's trivial to change the partition type,
>> so it's no hassle. The protection and support this
>> gives users certainly outweighs the hassle IMO.
>
> Don't forget that we currently support creating file systems on raw
> disk devices.  eg: /dev/ad1.  You are currently allowed to swapon
> /dev/ad2.  There are a lot of those out there, you can't break it
> because people know where you work and will come find you. :)

When there's no partitioning scheme on the disk,
gpart will not be involved and the checks won't
happen.

-- 
Marcel Moolenaar
xcllnt at mac.com