The code was removed because it was old, bitrotted and potentially dangerous. You really don't want to use old unmaintained code to resize your precious filesystem data.
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.
I fully agree. Hopefully libguestfs support will be added to GParted soon; as changing the partition layout and resizing the file systems within these partitions is usually a hand-in-hand process, it should be controllable from a single tool.
Unfortunately, as I understand it, the tools accompanying libguestfs aren't capable of resizing a file system in-place -- a major downside compared to what libparted could do, as you don't necessarily have a spare hard disk in your servers.
This is true, but really gparted doesn't need to use libparted (or libguestfs) at all for resizing. It should just call out to the native tools like resize2fs or ntfsresize. That's all that libguestfs is doing underneath the covers.
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.
Because the only thing I knew up to now was:
a) libparted moved to v3.0 and removed lots of filesystem specific code, and
b) as a consequence, gparted cannot deal with lots of filesystems anymore since v0.9.0 (when linked to libparted 3.0).
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 editorialized the title. We don't do that here. Please stop doing that. The scare quotes around "improvements" were particularly uncalled for. There was obviously a neutral way to word this story beyond "Release notes for GParted 0.9.0".
You could, if you were so inclined, fix the title now. "GParted 0.9.0 loses ability to resides FAT filesystems" might work.
PS: Sorry, YC disallows me from editing the title at this point of time. If anyone reading this has the administrative powers to do that, please go ahead.
I'm sorry for piling on, but the thing to do then is to do some research on the topic before submitting it. A few minutes of googling and looking at forums and change-logs should help give you an idea.
It's unfortunate that due to lack of communication most users of gparted will have no idea why this "killer feature" has just disappeared after an upgrade.
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.
[1] http://libguestfs.org
[2] http://libguestfs.org/virt-resize.1.html