default file system, was: Comparison to Workstation Technical Specification

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 12:44 PM, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:
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> On 02/26/2014 11:42 AM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
>
> I have no problems (personally) about allowing the different products
> to select different default filesystems. The reason people choose
> different filesystems is to serve different workloads, so I think this
> is just an extension of that.
>
>
>> 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 ?
>>
>
>
> I think we're saying "it's not stable enough for the *default*".
> That's a different statement from "it's not stable enough for use".
>
>
>> 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)
>>
>
> I'm slightly in favor of this for the Workstation, personally. Without
> wide adoption, btrfs will never get any better.

No, that isn't true.  Without wide adoption you may not have any
impetus for btrfs to get better.  However, it getting better is
dependent upon wider development, maintenance, and testing.  I'm not
sure we are in a position to actually do that, and that is the bulk of
my hesitation.  Throwing something upon Fedora users as a default with
the hopes that it will improve is pretty horrible in my opinion,
particularly if we aren't able to actually fix things they find.

josh