Comment 65 for bug 59620

I'd like to bring everyone on this bug report up to speed on where parted
currently sits with regard to the original reported issue.

Parted is currently at 1.8.0 which is mostly a bug fix release with some updates
to support new disk label types and partition IDs on new hardware (e.g., new
Macs). We [the parted team] are working on parted 2.0 while continuing the 1.x
branch for bug fixes.

The problem originally reported in this report is definitely a bug, but not a
simple fix in libparted. Currently, all of the filesystem code in libparted was
written from scratch. It does not make use of any filesystem libraries
available (e2fsprogs, and so on). This puts libparted at a severe disadvantage
when the filesystems introduce new features. Our decision was to rewrite the
filesystem layer to use those libraries directly rather than add support as
needed to parted. We can't guarantee that the latter method will work for
future filesystem versions, but we can guarantee a better level of compatibility
by using the libraries written by the same people that write the filesystems.

Our plan for parted 2.0 will add the support necessary to fix the problem
reported above.

Currently the _only_ tool that can resize ext3 filesystems is resize2fs
available in e2fsprogs. While annoying, you can use resize2fs to resize the
filesystem and then use fdisk or parted to resize the partition boundary to
match the new filesystem size. With parted 2.0, we'll be able to do this in one
step.