On Aug 8, 2014 4:03 PM, "Hedayat Vatankhah" <hedayat.fwd(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
GParted provides a number of essential features users might need,
some of
which are not provided even by any command line tools in Fedora
repositories: resizing and moving partitions/filesystems. And something
like resizing FAT partitions is what I have not seen in any other tools in
Fedora repositories except kde-partitionmanager. Anaconda provides resizing
facility, but not move. Also, I'm not sure if Anaconda can resize FAT
partitions.
...
I think there is rarely a case where moving partitions is a good idea.
I've seen two situations where it would be useful:
- on an MBR drive, the user deliberately created four primary partitions in
a way that left a bunch of unallocated space unusable without rearranging
things
* supplying gparted by default is going to enable this kind of misadventure
- the user has deliberately created a small partition in the middle of the
drive but wants to use that space in another filesystem
* again, self-inflicted
* combining scattered partitions into a volume group is arguably safer
The other reason - anecdotally more common - is that the user simply likes
to see the partitions in alphabetical order by label or mountpoint, or by
descending volume, or by color left to right. In short, arbitrary. Yeah,
I know part of the drive goes by the read head faster - show me some data
from a modern drive if you're going to argue the point, please.
Goofing around with your data at the block level is dangerous. A user
that's trying to 'perfect' their partition layout before installing has a
much greater chance of failure. IMO the convenience isn't worth the risk
or loss of space for more interesting things.
--Pete