Re: misc/45695: fdisk(8) has misleading naming of logical partitions

[David Holland <dholland-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

The following reply was made to PR misc/45695; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: David Holland <dholland-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost>
To: gnats-bugs%NetBSD.org@localhost
Cc: 
Subject: Re: misc/45695: fdisk(8) has misleading naming of logical partitions
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:04:35 +0000

 On Thu, Dec 08, 2011 at 10:35:01PM +0000, Julian Djamil Fagir wrote:
  > > > fdisk(8) has no mention of the word 'logical' partition, but always
  > > > talks about extended partitions. This is misleading, there is only
  > > > one extended partition (though several EBRs), the inner ones are
  > > > usually called logical partitions.
  > >  
  > >  Doesn't that depend on whose documentation you've been reading?
  >
  >  might be, but I've never seen nor heard this naming anywhere
  >  before the NetBSD fdisk manpage. The distinction logical-extended
  >  seems to be the standard.  Though I absolutely do not want to have
  >  Wikipedia as an absolute reference: German and English wikipedia
  >  state this way, too, and the French one calls them 'secondary
  >  partitions' and says logical drives are DOS terminology.  Linux'
  >  fdisk manpage uses this way of logical/extended, too.
 
 If the rest of the world has standardized on this terminology, we may
 as well follow suit.
 
 (BTW, there is more than one extended partition; each nested partition
 table contains one to hold the next nested partition table. They
 aren't visible though.)
 
 -- 
 David A. Holland
 dholland%netbsd.org@localhost