default file system, was: Comparison to Workstation Technical Specification

[Matthias Clasen]

On Wed, 2014-02-26 at 11:14 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 02:59:00PM +0000, Colin Walters wrote:
> > >Yeah, agreed here.  Everyone wants the latest shiniest thing, even if
> > >that thing isn't ready.  I really don't want to wade through tons of
> > >bug reports for btrfs just because it has a lot of hype.
> > Also, right now cloud is plain old ext4.   Let's see if we can ship
> > *all* of the filesystems!  It'll be fun!
> 
> Cloud could switch to XFS along with server. The main problem is that it'd
> make us revisit booting -- either 1) some work into lightening up grub2, 2)
> testing and possibly enhancing syslinux's xfs support, or 3) a separate
> /boot with a different filesystem. I don't really love any of those options.

I'm always dubious of 'there shall be only one' decrees - be it
installers or desktop environments or file systems.

Also, as has already been pointed out: there are Fedora systems out
there using ext4, xfs, btrfs and probably a few other file systems
today. If we now suddenly change track and consider btrfs not 'safe
enough', wasn't it pretty irresponsible of us to let people use it for
their installations ?

For the workstation, I think the options are

- switch to btrfs soon to give it the exposure it needs to get ready
(while being careful to limit the supported features, as suse does)

- stick with ext4 until we have some user-visible features (time
slider...) that make a switch to btrfs very attractive