1. Gnome Storage Manager

1.1. Preview

Actually we have diverse tools to deal with partitioning, resizing and formating, but the platform lacks a general tool to address this tasks. Current tools I have in mind:
- Gparted: Cool tool based on libparted. It is a front-end to parted, made to simplify disk resizing tasks. It is programmed using C++ and gtkmm.
- GnomeSystemTools: Disk management tool. This was an initial effort to bring up a partitioning tool.
- Partimage: Curses client-server program designed to backup entire partitions and store them on a file. It is similar in functionality to Ghost or the dmg image functionality of MacOs X. It is appropriate for distributing compressed disk images.
- EVMS: IBM EVMS is an alternative volume managing system with several interfaces. It is too complex and unintuitive. For professional use.

We have a storage detection backend. I plan to use hal to deal with storage detection. Other technologies like DBus may be appropriate for inter process communication were required.
Support for software RAID volumes. Actually RAID configuration is done by hand or with distro-based tools. We should be able to provide this functionality for the standard GNOME desktop.
Support for LVM volumes: LVM volumes simplify large storage management. It should be easy to read this volumes once detected.
Support for imaging and compression. We can use an advanced compression algorithm to achieve better compression ratios than partimage. Maybe we can use a squashed filesystem to obtain a compressed image that we can simply mount as a loop device, or improve the code on partimage library to use another more advanced compression algorithm.
Resizing support via parted/libparted.
Client-Server architecture to permit multicast partition cloning and remote operation.

Phase 1: Partimage resurrection: I will start to revive partimage software and split it in 2 layers:
- - Libpartimage: Written in C++, as the original, it will be a little library that other projects could easily
  - reuse. Maybe it could be hosted in freedesktop.
  - GPartimage: It will be a GTK+ user interface that we could use to test the application.
- Date of Starting: March 2006.
Phase 2: We will work on gnome-system-tools disk admin component to integrate libpartimage and gparted there.
Phase 3: Start using hal for disk detection. Add RAID detection and LVM detection.
Phase 4: Redesign GUI