Re: /proc guidelines and sysctl

[Mark van Walraven]

On Fri, Jan 07, 2000 at 01:26:55AM -0500, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> Unfortunately it doesn't work well for tables; but then again, neither
> do the current /proc files that contain tables, which often cause
> programs to break when new rows are added.

Which leads me wonder how difficult it would be if I wanted to change the
format of /proc/partitions from:

    "%4d  %4d %10d %s\n",
    p->major, n,
    p->sizes[n],
    disk_name(p, n, buf)

to:

    "%4d  %4d  %10d %s %02x\n",
    p->major, n,
    p->sizes[n],
    disk_name(p, n, buf),
    p->sys_ind

That is, to include the partition type.

It would eliminate the need to be able to parse six kinds of partition
table in a program I am modifying, but also potentially break many
programs that rely on the current format.  Are, could or should there be
rules for formats, that they can be extended while retaining backwards
compatibility?  (Creating a parallel "/proc/xpartitions", while easy to
do, does not appeal to me.)

Regards,

Mark.