Re: [PATCH] resize2fs: add debug switch to use old online interface

[Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 10:10:49AM -0200, Carlos Maiolino wrote:
> the patch looks good, but I'm very concerned about how much problems this will
> cause to stable releases and enterprise products which use to work with older
> kernel versions but a lot of backports of new features/bug fixes. Probably
> upstream stable releases will not be too much affected giving these features
> (new resize interface) might never be ported to stable kernels, but how about
> the backporters? This mightl cause a lot of confusion when changing the
> major/minor versions needed here.
> 
> IMHO, the new resize interface looks much better than the old one, and just
> developers and users which do not have new interface should make use of the old
> one. For developers I believe a resize2fs option is good enough to be used as
> debug, and for users, well, if they do not have the new resize2fs, we should do
> noting, once they'll use the old one automatically :-)

Well, this environment variable was intended only for developers who
would be doing testing.  Note that I didn't bother to documenting both
the older debugging environment variable, nor this new debugging
environment variable.  It would problably be a good idea for me to
write up the changes in the resize2fs interface (i.e., the new resize
ioctl in 3.3, meta_bg / 64-bit resizing in 3.7) in the ext4 wiki, if
for no other reason so that less sophisticated distributions _know_
which commits they should back port so they can have a fully working
resize2fs.  :-)

						- Ted