Re: Libvolume incorrectly detects FAT32

[iSteve <isteve@oneofthe.peoplewithissues.net>]

On Tue, 7 Mar 2006 18:15:04 +0100
Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 06:01:17PM +0100, iSteve wrote:
> > On Mon, 6 Mar 2006 23:37:20 +0100
> > Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org> wrote:
> > I would have another suggestion then; how about a scoring system?
> > 
> > Probes would be given OPTIONAL scoring system, let's say in percents, eg. in
> > case of fat, lack of magic would make it lose 20%; some other filesystem
> > would return just 0 or 100% hit (ie. just like it is now). Then the probe
> > with greatest score wins.
> > 
> > I understand this design is for working with semibroken partitions, and I
> > fear it won't be welcome warmly; but I still got to propose it:)
> > 
> > I am willing to code it, I've written about ten probes for my own detection
> > system until I noticed libvolumeid, but I want approval of design first.
> 
> I'm all for fixing the stupid formatters. Seems the problems are really
> rare these days anyway, with Windows doing it right now and almost all
> distros use HAL today which has the same code and we don't get a lot of
> error reports anymore.
> 
> The right way I think, is to add more checks to the probing code, if the
> filesytem that is recognized is actually "valid". But that is impossible
> for some situations like mkswap (which is the silliest formatting tool on
> earth that I've ever seen) on top of fat. You can even mount the
> corrupted fat volume with the kernel and write to it.
> 
> So, I'm not sure if a score will give us something valuable. You basically
> push the problem to the user of the lib, which is a slippery road. But if
> we detect that we can't be sure what kind of filesystem we detect, we
> could throw an error and don't return any type, that would be at least a
> safe way to handle that and would fix the real problem, which are in
> almost all cases the too simple and broken Linux command line tools.
> 
> Thanks,
> Kay

So the bottom line is, "no, this idea won't make it"? How about, then, let the
user of the lib (ie. the app using the lib) specify whether it wants a full
match or not? In the effect, it'd only allow two approaches; the lax one it is
now and a very strict one... The obvious approach would be to go strict first
and then if no match, try it lax; but having this option could really be
helpful.

 -- iSteve



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