Re: [Design] nested partitions: Unify grub_partition and grub_disk

[phcoder <phcoder@gmail.com>]

I forgot to speak about another question: partition naming. I see 2 
possibilities
1) purely numeric unified naming scheme. It means that
(hd0,1,a) becomes (hd0,1,1)
On one hand mixed number-letter scheme is similar to what freebsd uses 
but on the other hand numerical scheme is versatile and allows unlimited 
nestedness. And I don't see why we would use a scheme specific to one of 
many supported OSes.
2) Every partition map is allowed to pick the name that it likes as long 
as it contains no comma. In this way we would need to keep 
partition-name parsing functions in partitition map modules. It means 
that this code would be duplicated. But this scheme is better in the 
cases when partition map has no numbering scheme but instead has labels 
attached to partitions. But in this case IMO search command should be 
used find the partition

I personally would prefer the first way
> Also an interesting question is how would "has_partitions" field be
> handled in this scheme.

Just ignored. It's actually used only to optimise some code out based on 
the assumption that some media has no partitions. Performance gain is 
negligible but if this assumption doesn't hold true grub won't be able 
to access the partitions which are really here. Famous example is a 
cdrom. Most people would assume that cdrom has no partitions. But on 
powerpc bootable cdroms use APM



-- 

Regards
Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko