[fab] Filesystems support in Fedora

[Rahul]

seth vidal wrote:
> 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?
> 

This has similarities to the RPM discussion that came up recently. 
Though it is a specific package, any changes has a large impact. It is 
better to have a wider look at this IMO.

Rahul