fdisk version in dapper ppc is too old

[Gustavo Rahal]

Binary package hint: mac-fdisk

fdisk version on a i386 dapper is 2.12 while in ppc is 0.4a2. Such an old version lack important features.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Can you confirm whether you are filing this bug against 'fdisk', which is part of 'util-linux' and is at version 2.12r-4ubuntu6.1 in all builds of Dapper (i386, amd64 and PPC), or 'mac-fdisk', which is different to fdisk, and is currently at version 0.1-13 and only available on PPC anyway?

[Gustavo Rahal (gustavo-grahal)]

Right, I guess it should be in util-linux package. I see that other ppc distro's (just checked rhel4) have a newer version of fdisk so mac-fdisk is not the only fdisk available for ppc arch.
So I would like to see, if possible, util-linux use a newer version of fdisk on ppc machine, which probably means, not use mac-fdisk

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

I don't really understand what you mean. util-linux is at the same version across amd64, i386 and ppc versions of Dapper (currently 2.12r-4ubuntu6.1 as I already pointed out). util-linux will not just be upgraded from this version to the latest (currently 2.14 in Intrepid), as it is not eligible for a stable release update (see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates). The only updates in a stable release will be security fixes and fixes for major/high-impact bugs. What important features does fdisk miss in Dapper? What particular problems do you have with it?

The same stable-release update process applies to mac-fdisk too.

Incidentally, mac-fdisk is currently at 0.1-13 in Dapper and the newest version in Debian Testing and Intrepid is only 0.1-15. I don't know where you get the version 0.4a2 from - you've lost me completely!

[Gustavo Rahal (gustavo-grahal)]

I was debugging a user issue and now the user installed hardy on the machine that had dapper so I can't get more details. What I can say is that hardy ppc now has a GNU fdisk 1.0, what ever that means.
And I can confirm that issuing fdisk -v in dapper gives me version 0.4a2 and looking at /usr/sbin fdisk is linked to mac-fdisk

What I noticed is that there seems to be three implementations of fdisk:
 1. mac-fdisk
 2. "fdisk" (which is what I see in redhat ppc for instance and that matches the version of x86 fdisk)
 3. GNU fdisk

The version in dapper ppc (mac-fdisk) is missing the "-S" parameter for example which is useful to get partition size. I can't really help further as I'm also lost on all these fdisk versions and implementations. Feel free to close this bug if you think you also can't/not a priority to solve the puzzle.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

mac-fdisk, gnu-fdisk and util-linux fdisk are 3 separate pieces of software. The versions of mac-fdisk currently in Dapper, Gutsy, Hardy and Intrepid are all based on the same upstream source version (which will all return "0.4a2" when you run "fdisk -v"). You probably see differences in featureset between Dapper/Hardy because you're not running the same fdisk at all (ie, you might be running mac-fdisk in Dapper and gnu-fdisk in Hardy). You can fix this by installing which ever one you want.

As I said before, updating something as basic as util-linux to provide a version of fdisk with a slightly higher version number will not happen in a stable release, so I'm closing this bug report.

Thanks