On Jun 6, 2007, at 10:37 AM, De Zeurkous wrote:

> 1) It includes features which are not necessary (GUIDs for example);

Maybe not necessary in your limited world, but they're quite useful in  
the real world.

> 2) It's practically a superset of MBR (calling it 'protective' doesn't
> change that fact);

You're still confused as to what that MBR is actually there for.  I  
can't fix that; you just need to educate yourself.

> 3) It deals with a load of IBM PC-specific (mostly Windoze, even)  
> stuff;

Can you please be specific?

> 4) Worse, it deals with some stuff that is likely to change (fixed
> checksum format, little-endianness, other constants which should be
> copy-on-write)

Why do you think these things are "likely to change"?

> 5) Doesn't seem to have non-specific metadata fields, even optional.

Oh really?  Please explain specifically what you'd like to see, and  
then maybe I can show you how to do it with GPT.  I happen to have a  
fair amount of experience using GPT in interesting ways.

> 6) M$ and Intel seem to have pushed it, which most likely means the
> current format is gone faster than it takes to be actually  
> standardized.

Uh... so that automatically makes it evil?  A de facto standard that  
provides basically everything that we need is certainly better than  
none at all, and adopting a de facto standard has advantages to  
rolling one's own.

> Those should be standardized to network byte order in the new  
> disklabel
> format.

Any reason other than religion?

> Still, why not remove the impact of the collision entirely?

As engineers, we weigh effort vs. benefit.  For the amount of effort,  
I don't see a lot of additional benefit over GUIDs.

> Footnote or not, when M$ and Intel are involved you can be /sure/  
> that it
> will be come practically required soon enough.

Quite a mind reader you are.

> The Windoze-specificness and legacy support built into GPT, and, as  
> a side
> note, the fact that I prefer Sun workstations running NetBSD over  
> IBM PCs.

What Windows-specific stuff are you talking about?  Legacy?  You mean  
the protective MBR?  Whatever.

-- thorpej