[Toybox] [New toy] partprobe

[Rob Landley]

On 05/30/14 10:47, Bertold Van den Bergh wrote:
> The solution of the 'real' partprobe is to call BLKPG on all paritions,

I don't call other versions of commands "real" for the same reason the
minix implementation of cat isn't the "real" cat even though Linux
started out as a clone of minix (with the announcement on comp.os.minix
and everything).

There was a Bell Labs implementation ("unix 7" and such, for 16-bit
hardware), then the commercial side of AT&T forked it and did "Unix
System V" and such, berkeley forked that and did "BSD 4.3" and such
until a judge ruled that none of the original code remained (in response
to an AT&T lawsuit claiming to own their stuff).

Meanwhile, it got several from-scratch clones, such as Minix by Andrew
Tanenbaum and Coherent from the Mark Williams Company. (The GNU project
announced the intention to do another such clone in 1983, and when they
_utterly_ failed they claimed that other people's clones were really
their clones and tried to attach their name to them.)

Linux was a clone of Minix. Android is a fork off of Linux about the way
BSD was a fork off of System V, or MacOS X was a fork off of BSD. (Ok,
the MacOS X Freebsd thing is waaay more complicated than that, there was
NeXT and Mach and the whole BSDi, BSD-386, Net/Free/Open BSD thing in
there which can be described as 15 years of infighting among people who
really didn't like each other).

If Busybox was a "fake" implementation of GNU commands, then the GNU
versions were "fake" implementations of the
Solaris/HPUX/AIX/Xenix/Unixware commands they copied.

> this allows limited resizing while other partitions are in use. While
> this is a good solution, there are still many cases where the partitions
> cannot be resized online (eg overlap with other, mounter, partition). It
> would also make the program a lot more complex as it has to parse
> several types of partition table.

I'm pretty happy with the kernel parsing the partition tables.

> Sincerely,
> Bertold Van den Bergh

Rob

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