Changes in behavior
Remove all FS-related (file system-related) sub-commands; these commands
are no longer recognized because they were all dependent on parted "knowing"
too much about file system: mkpartfs, mkfs, cp, move, check, resize.
This change removes not just the user interface bits, but also the
library functions and nearly all of the underlying FS-munging code.
The code embedded in Parted by which it knew about those file systems
was so old, unmaintainable and buggy that while seemingly drastic,
this change is like removing a gangrenous toe.(disclaimer: I wrote the HFS/HFS+ code.)
Removing code because it's "old" or unmaintainable but which relied on features require seems like a questionable decision to me.
Gparted isn't a game. It's a critical filesystem utility. Code that isn't maintainable is by definition vulnerable in terms of both security and functionality.
Functionality.. eh. Having used gparted extensively and not having a single problem among hundreds of filesystem resizes, I've got to thank the maintainers for finally forcing me to get off my ass and purchase a commercial solution that can be trusted to not have critical functionality yanked.
So thanks for that.
In any case there are better ways to do this. I have an interest in this, having developed libguestfs[1] and virt-resize[2]. But I'd say that even if you don't use libguestfs, you must use the latest upstream kernel code and tools (as libguestfs does) because that's the code that will not corrupt your data.
While obviously gparted folk have got a bit of development work to do, which you can argue was made necessary by changes in libparted, really they should have taken a close look at all that crufty filesystem code in libparted, run a mile, and used the native tools a long time ago.
These are the facts available to me, I wasn't trying to bait anyone. I found it of common interest that in a year or so, when these parted/gparted versions arrive in the major distributions, you won't be able to do certain things with GParted you used to do, like resizing a FAT32 partition.
You could, if you were so inclined, fix the title now. "GParted 0.9.0 loses ability to resides FAT filesystems" might work.
These 'features' were removed because they were old, not well maintained, and don't fit into the core feature set of parted. You are better off relying on dedicated tools to do your filesystem specific operations.
I can already resize partitions manually with fdisk; What I liked was being able to resize the partitions, grow the FS to match, and write it all to disk easily.
I think the blame is more to be laid upon GParted than Parted; Parted seems to be going about their business normally, and GParted is apparently sticking to a philosophy of strict adherence to libparted without any additional dependencies?