AnonymousFox

//usr/share/doc/parted-2.1/README

GNU Parted
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GNU Parted is a program for manipulating partition tables.

WARNING: USING PARTED TO PERFORM FILE SYSTEM OPERATIONS IS DEPRECATED
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Parted retains (for now) the ability to create and modify a few types of
file systems, but that functionality is deprecated.  Whenever possible,
we recommend that you use file-system-specific tools to create and
operate on file systems.  For example, use the e2fsprogs programs
to operate on ext2, ext3 and ext4 file systems.  Use programs from
the reiserfsprogs package if you want to manipulate reiserfs file
systems.  Although Parted lets you do some of the same things, the
file-system-related code in parted is not as robust as the code in
more specialized, FS-specific packages.

So far, we have good arguments for retaining the capability to resize
FAT and HFS file systems: as far as we know, no other free software
provides that functionality.  However, all other FS-related functionality
will be removed from an upcoming release of Parted.  Thus, you should
now avoid using the following commands: mkpartfs, mkfs, cp, move, check
since support for them will be removed.

See the file NEWS for a list of major changes in the current release.

* documentation is in the doc/ directory.  The User's documentation is in
texinfo format, and is built into a format viewable by info/pinfo when
you run make.  To view the distributed texinfo documentation, run this:

$ info -f parted.info

Or view it on-line at:

http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/manual/parted.html

* the GNU Parted home page is http://www.gnu.org/software/parted
 * the GNU Parted FAQ can be found at
   http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/faq.html
 * send bug reports, requests for help, feature requests, comments, etc. to
   bug-parted@gnu.org.

NOTE TO DISTRIBUTIONS
---------------------

(1) When compiling Parted for distribution for general use, we recommend using
the default configuration:

CFLAGS=-Os ./configure

This includes --enable-debug (by default), which contains many assertions.
Obviously, these "waste" space, but in the past, they have caught potentially
dangerous bugs before they would have done damage, so we think it's worth
it.  Also, it means we get more bug reports ;)

(2) When doing dependencies, remember that libreiserfs is a *soft* dependency,
so I guess that means Debian-look-alikes should do a "suggests", but
not a "requires".

(3) When space is important, we suggest --without-readline, --disable-shared,
and possibly --disable-nls and --disable-dynamic-loading.

If Parted is only going to be used for probing / discovery (and not
"editing"), there is a --enable-discovery-only and --disable-fs (when you're
only interested in partition tables).  Since it's readonly, --enable-debug
gains you nothing wrt safety, so use --disable-debug ;)  The "discover"
program is about 35k (gzipped) when compiled this way (not counting libc
and libuuid).