blivet-gui announcement

Good news, everyone! We (me and CC'd Vojtech Trefny) would like to introduce you the next generation tool for storage management -- the **blivet-gui** tool [1]_. It is a GUI tool based on the blivet python library (originally Anaconda's storage management and configuration tool) inspired by GParted and other storage management tools. Why not use GParted you ask? The reason we came up with blivet-gui is that none of the existing storage management tools supports all storage technologies supported in modern Linux distributions. Anaconda does support them all so it's only logical to take Anaconda's storage backend, combine it with a nice, intuitive and in general user-friendly frontend and build a standalone application for storage management. The GUI of blivet-gui is heavily based on GParted's UI to minimize the surprise which is very important in such a critical task as storage management is. If you know how to work with GParted, you'll almost instantly know how to work with blivet-gui. All requested changes are just enqueued first and then processed/committed to disk by the "Apply" button just like in GParted. However, with blivet-gui those actions may be something like the following sequence: create 10GB partition sda1, create a LUKS device on top of it and use the LUKS device as a PV for a VG called ``dataVG`` with a single LV ``data`` occupying half of the VG space and with XFS on top of the LV, not only partitioning and file system operations like GParted does. Having troubles writing partitioning part of a kickstart file for automated installation? Run blivet-gui with the ``--kickstart`` option and export the partitioning portion of a kickstart file instead of committing changes to disk. On top of the features described above, the blivet-gui is embedable so any application using any toolkit with the XEmbed protocol support (Gtk, Qt,...) may use blivet-gui as a part of its GUI. The application only started its history few months ago, is under heavy development now and will get new features in the next months (RAID, BTRFS), but even now it is a very nice and useful tool. Suggestions, feature requests, bug reports and of course PATCHES ARE WELCOME! It is quite a simple Gtk application written in Python which makes it an easy target for everybody who misses something in the other storage management tools. Don't like Gtk? Text mode would be really, really useful too! Don't feel like adding new features and diving deep in blivet to implement them? The code always needs refactorization and cleanup! I think everybody can submit patches for blivet-gui and I'm really looking forward to see the hundreds of patches from all those people that hate every storage management GUIs and tools that have every existed. Let's spend some time on pushing the Linux storage management further instead of just complaining! .. [1] http://blog.vojtechtrefny.cz/blivet-gui P.S. Do you know about any other mailing lists or individuals that may be interested in this announcement? Feel free to forward the message and spread the word! -- Vratislav Podzimek Anaconda Rider | Red Hat, Inc. | Brno - Czech Republic