Feature Request

[Jeremy Portzer]

On Thu, 2003-07-24 at 15:56, Ethan Bonick wrote:
> Something I have wanted for the last two releases is the ability to choose
> more than ext2 or ext3 for my partitions. I would like to be able to
> choose jfs, reiserfs, xfs at install time without having to boot resuce
> create partitions and then start the install and choose do not format. Is
> there a reason for not really having a choice?
> 
> Just my $.02 here. Linux is all about choice yet we seem to be moving
> toward the distributors choice. I know. I know. You all say switch to a
> different distro if I dont like it. Well I have tried and I havent liked
> any of the others. Gentoo was good but just not stable. I just hate to see
> all of our choices go away because we want to be able to have mom and pop
> install on their machines. We should be left with some choices and not
> have to dumb everything down. Even Win2K and XP gave you partition type
> choices.

The cynical viewpoint on why other distributinos are "not stable" could
be because they use other partition types, such as resier and xfs, that
are not nearly as stable as ext2/3.  Have you ever thought of that
correlation?  [Not trying to shoot out red herrings here, but you left
yourself open to that.  And reiserfs certainly has had its share of
problems over the past couple of years; I can't speak for the others.]

Why did Red Hat choose ext3 over the other journalled filesystems? 
Because they were bought off by the ext3 developers?  Because they don't
want a j in the name of the filesystem?  NO, it's because they carefully
analyzed the merits and problems of each one and decided that ext3 was
the most appropriate.  I believe there was a "Red Hat Speaks" article on
this a while back, though those don't seem to be archived for very long
so I can't be sure.  The long and short of it was -- ext3 is the best
for general audiences.  If you are really enough of a power user that
you need one of the others, you certainly have the skills to set it up
yourself.  There just weren't enough compelling reasons to support the
infrastructure needed for multiple journalling filesystems when ext3
does the job just fine.

Just my $0.01

--Jeremy

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