GParted: core features lost due to parted's "improvements" in v3.0

The code was removed because it was old, bitrotted and potentially <i>dangerous</i>. You really don't want to use old unmaintained code to resize your precious filesystem data.<p>In any case there are better ways to do this. I have an interest in this, having developed libguestfs[1] and virt-resize[2]. But I'd say that even if you don't use libguestfs, you must use the latest upstream kernel code and tools (as libguestfs does) because that's the code that will not corrupt your data.<p>[1] <a href="http://libguestfs.org" rel="nofollow">http://libguestfs.org</a><p>[2] <a href="http://libguestfs.org/virt-resize.1.html" rel="nofollow">http://libguestfs.org/virt-resize.1.html</a>

I am the parted maintainer for Fedora. I also help with upstream a bit (I removed the CHS asserts for example). These are my own opinions:<p>These 'features' were removed because they were old, not well maintained, and don't fit into the core feature set of parted. You are better off relying on dedicated tools to do your filesystem specific operations.

It looks like the same support for all file systems was removed from libparted. According to the release notes:<p><pre><code> Changes in behavior Remove all FS-related (file system-related) sub-commands; these commands are no longer recognized because they were all dependent on parted "knowing" too much about file system: mkpartfs, mkfs, cp, move, check, resize. This change removes not just the user interface bits, but also the library functions and nearly all of the underlying FS-munging code. The code embedded in Parted by which it knew about those file systems was so old, unmaintainable and buggy that while seemingly drastic, this change is like removing a gangrenous toe.</code></pre>

I don't see why this should be an unsurmountable thing for GParted to implement. If Parted is removing the code because it's unmaintained and crufty, someone else has a well-maintained tool for the same thing. Why can't GParted call mkfs.x? Parted still resizes partitions, after all...<p>I think the blame is more to be laid upon GParted than Parted; Parted seems to be going about their business normally, and GParted is apparently sticking to a philosophy of strict adherence to libparted without any additional dependencies?

I don't get why these libparted features were "deprecated" when their removal leads to GParted 0.9.0 effectively dropping FAT16/FAT32 and HFS(+) support.