Status to make btsfs to the standard filesystem of Fedora

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2013-01-16 at 09:53 +0100, Jochen Schmitt wrote:
> Hallo,
> 
> for Fedora 17 we had a feature to make btrfs to the
> standard filesystem of Fedora. This feature was defered
> because the fsck utitlities for btrfs was not available
> on the stable state for Fedora 17.
> 
> So, I would like to ask, if there any plans to make this to
> a feautre for F-19. I think it may be sense to integreate
> this feature to the rewrite of the part of anaconde which
> is responsible for disc partitioning. In a article of the
> c't magazin (a german computer magazin) I could read, that
> this part of the new release of anaconda may be get any
> more love.
> 
> Additionally, because I have read about an issue relating
> btrfs with LVM2 on this mailing list and lost the thread, I
> woould like to ask about the starte of this issue.

There's been some useful and interesting discussion in this thread about
the kernel and anaconda layers, but I think the higher layers also need
to be taken into account. I only really started poking at btrfs at all
seriously during F18 testing, and what I noticed that I hadn't really
understood before is that some user-level tools just don't work well
with btrfs at all.

btrfs gives you a whole suite of its own command line tools, in
'btrfs-progs', which you're supposed to use to inspect and fiddle with
btrfs volumes and subvols. Which, I mean, great, I guess. But what
worries me is that tools that sysadmins use on a daily basis, like 'df'
and 'mount', just don't really work with btrfs at all. They show you
something that at some deeply technical level is correct, but is not the
info you were really expecting - 'what's mounted where?' and 'how much
space do I have left on XXX?'.

I understand that btrfs is a Different Way Of Doing Things, but I don't
think it flies to tell people 'yeah, the tools you've relied on for
simple info on filesystems for years don't work any more, learn this
whole new set of tools'. There should at least be an effort to make very
standard tools return information that's as close as possible to what
the user wanted. This is particularly important in the context of 'make
it the default': right now we can make a reasonable assumption that
people who pick to install with btrfs are actively interested in it and
willing to learn the Right Way to interact with it, but by making it the
default, we'd be 

df and mount are the two that stick out most clearly in my memory, but
I'm sure there are others and people may be able to contribute them.
gnome-disks also doesn't really interpret btrfs right at all, or didn't
the last time I checked.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net