[fab] Filesystems support in Fedora

[seth vidal]

On Tue, 2006-07-18 at 02:33 +0530, Rahul wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Ext3(ext2) are the only formally supported on disk filesystems in Fedora 
> apart from GFS for clustering. There is a limited option for other 
> filesystems like reiserfs, xfs and jfs which doesnt go much beyond 
> packaging what upstream provides and which is only meant to be 
> transiently used for people migrating off such filesystems.
> 
> Moving such tools to Fedora Extras doesnt help since Anaconda wouldnt 
> support it during installation time. I am not sure this would make sense 
> even if Anaconda gets support for Fedora Extras. Community participation 
> on such things tend to be limited due to the amount of expertise 
> required. The large impact of such a core piece of technology needs to 
> be taken into account here.
> 
> I believe it is better to get them supported or drop them completely 
> instead of the current status quo which leads to a less tested and 
> potentially dangerous option being provided to provided to end users 
> (though they have to enable it explicitly). Without good support, things 
> like SELinux in reiserfs to pick a example would end up being broken now 
> and then and that isnt a good thing at all.
> 
> Realistically we need to make a hard choice on this. explain that well, 
> stick to that and make sure that support well what we do rather than 
> provide a multitude of half baked options (kernel-unsupported comes to 
> mind for those aware of the pains we had with it).
> 

Why wouldn't this sort of technical decision be made by the installer
maintainers?

-sv