Re: [PATCH] try to avoid false positives on FAT filesystem

[phcoder <phcoder@gmail.com>]

If I understood you correctly you propose to use partition table 
information to determine filesystem. I'm personally against it. First of 
all it isn't portable - it probably wouldn't work on GPT. Second if you 
just do mkfs.* <device> the partition type isn't changed. Linux ignores 
partition type and so if your patch is applied there will be many bug 
reports like "hey, *FS isn't detected". Finally sometimes you 
intentionally change partition type in the technics like partition 
hiding. IMO the correct solution to this problem is to make sure that 
fat and ntfs are probed at last. Should we add a priority field for this?
Thanks
Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko
Felix Zielcke wrote:
> Here's a little patch to check if
> bpb.version_specific.fat12_or_fat16.fstype or
> bpb.version_specific.fat32.fstype has the string FAT12/FAT16/FAT32
> As can be seen on [0] and [1] Dell PCs have a small FAT partition
> containing some utilities.
> It seems like mkfs.ext2 isn't always clearing the first 512 bytes.
> Good for us is that fstype is set to .AT16 on these Dell partitions, so
> it can be easily avoided.
> Are there any objections?
> 
> [0] http://bugs.debian.org/514263
> [1] http://bugs.debian.org/505137