sysutils/ntfsprogs status

[Florent Thoumie]

Tom Alsberg wrote:

> I see that the Linux ntfsprogs package has been entered into the
> ports. 
> 
> A while ago, (before that port, I believe), I tried to get it to work
> on FreeBSD - compiling it was quite easy (use GCC 3.3, and link with
> -lgnugetopt, which the port maintainer apparently forgot), but there

	Actually I didn't forgot to link with -lgnugetopt.
	You must see a USE_GETOPT_LONG=yes line in the port's Makefile.

> were many problems with running it afterwards - locks and seeks
> FreeBSD didn't like, semaphores and block sizes, etc.
> 
> After getting some utilities to work (e.g. ntfsls), I was working on
> my main target - ntfsclone, but got tired of it sometime after some
> trouble.
> 
> I'm interested, except the work done to get it into the ports and to
> barely compile (with the change of -lgnugetopt), is any effort
> underway to get those ntfsprogs to really fully work on FreeBSD?
> 
> This is FreeBSD 4.10 here, maybe I'm outdated and on -CURRENT
> everything's fixed already...
> 
> The main problems are:
> 	* unsatisfied seeks and locking calls,
> 	* no block devices on FreeBSD, so have to add ISCHR check to
> 	  ISBLK so that it doesn't require the -f flag,
> 	* cannot get size of device on FreeBSD, to compare with volume
> 	  size and for grow, clone, etc.
> 
> So, what's the status of this port?  I can contribute some patches to
> make it compile cleanly and work a bit better, but not perfectly (not
> all utils work).  I'd be happy to know that someone already did better
> fixing to it.

	When Ntfsprogs 1.8.2 was released, I saw this on the project's
	homepage : "Changes: In this release, ntfsprogs now builds and
	works on FreeBSD.". I have made the ports but I didn't sent it
	at the moment.

	If you tell me this doesn't work on FreeBSD 4.x, I can trust you,
	I didn't test it since I have no NTFS partitions on my FreeBSD
	boxes. I just tried to make it compiles properly.

	If you can make it works better, you can send your patches and
	talk to the developers (they're on #ntfs on freenode).

	Before I mark the port as BROKEN, maybe people who tested it on
	FreeBSD could give their testimonals.

	Note: If you're interested in taking the port maintainership,
	just ask.

-- 
Florent Thoumie                        Epita SRS Promo 2005
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