Ability to renumber partitions as a supported operation

[ermo]

One thing I've wanted to be able to do since forever, is to be able to seamlessly re-number an existing partition.

So imagine you have 5 partitions on a drive. You buy a new drive for your for your / partition and remove an ESP (1), an XBOOTLDR (2), a swap (3) and the / (4) partition, leaving only (5) your /home partition on the old drive.

in this case, you would obviously get rid of partitions [1, 2, 3, 4] on the old drive that you're repurposing to be /home only. However, once you delete the existing partitions, move the /home partition to the start of the drive and then finally expand it, the single /home one is now partition 5, which looks a bit dumb.

So, assuming that the planner knows what it is doing, why not have the last operation be "rename the now single 5 to 1"? The only thing you're changing is the number in the GPT; the start, end and flag/type stuff stays the same as the original partition.

The only difference here is that, since the rename is supported (= has test cases and is validated by the planner etc.), you're not sat biting your nails because you're having to do it manually?

IDK, seems useful to me at least.