Comment 4 for bug 897029

Ah, I must've mis-explained. The short format is exclusive for 2.6 actually, but only for partitions; if you have one of those and look at /proc/diskstats, you should see the short one.
For 2.4, there's actually even more fields, though I can't find a definition for those. Haven't tested it, but I'm assuming that both the old and short versions croak on those.

Should I still make it die? If it helps, both iostat and Sys::Statistics::Linux::DiskStats consider the two forms correct.