hfsprogs in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is very old (2009s), please update to latest 641 release

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas]

hfsprogs package, which is derived from diskdev_cmds, is very outdated vs Apple sources. Ubuntu and Debian still has ver 332.25 which was from MacOS X10.4 (~10 years old) when upstream from latest MacOS X is at version 641

http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/diskdev_cmds/diskdev_cmds-576/
http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/os-x-10105/

Additional information: https://packages.qa.debian.org/h/hfsprogs.html

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[James Cuzella (trinitronx)]

PING! Any plans for movement on updating this package?

Is this package mainly imported from upstream (Debian) ?

How can I verify which version of the "diskdev_cmds" project is used on modern macOS?

Current macOS version 10.15.4 has binary "fsck_hfs" from "hfs-522.100.5".

As evidenced by:

    strings $(which fsck_hfs ) | grep PROJECT:
    @(#)PROGRAM:fsck_hfs PROJECT:hfs-522.100.5

However, I'm only seeing up to version 522.0.9 here: https://opensource.apple.com/source/hfs/

It sounds like this particular set of tools, fsck.hfs[plus] & mkfs.hfs[plus], were sourced originally from diskdev_cmds project ( https://opensource.apple.com/source/diskdev_cmds/ ).

I'm a bit confused as to whether current Apple macOS even uses the "diskdev_cmds" project at all. Searching their binaries for "PROJECT:diskdev_cmds" yields no results:

    OLDIFS="$IFS"; IFS=':'; for p in $PATH; do sudo find "$p" -type f -print0 | sudo xargs -0 strings | grep PROJECT: ; done | sort | uniq | grep -i diskdev ; IFS="$OLDIFS"
    # No results!
    # Tip: taking off the last '| grep -i diskdev' command from the pipe shows *all* current project versions of macOS command line utilities ;-)

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

>Is this package mainly imported from upstream (Debian) ?

Yes, this package seems to mainly be synced from Debian to Ubuntu. There was some discussion on the corresponding Debian bug report regarding updating it, but nothing recently. Afraid I don't know much about the other questions :)

[James Cuzella (trinitronx)]

@hjd: Thanks for the quick response! As you pointed out, it looks like the upstream bug report has more info and discussion here:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=765104

So far, no movement since February 2019 from the maintainer and some offers of help from others in maintaining it. I guess we can hope that it can be picked up by another maintainer or two that have some time to do it.

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz (glaubitz)]

Hello!

I have updated the Debian package to version 540.1.linux3-1 now which is used by Fedora, openSUSE and other distributions.

Someone from Ubuntu would need to import the latest sources from Debian to update the package.

Thanks,
Adrian

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

>I have updated the Debian package to version 540.1.linux3-1 now

Great! This was synced automatically and built in the current Ubuntu development release, hirsute.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hfsprogs/540.1.linux3-1

[James Cuzella (trinitronx)]

> I have updated the Debian package to version 540.1.linux3-1 now which is used by Fedora, openSUSE and other distributions.

@glaubitz - 🙌 👏 🎉 Excellent! Thanks for your hard work porting this over!

> Great! This was synced automatically and built in the current Ubuntu development release, hirsute.

@hjd - Great news! I've also just backported this for Focal 20.04 into a PPA:

https://launchpad.net/~trinitronx/+archive/ubuntu/hfsprogs