Re: [PATCH] fstests: remove reiserfs support

[David Sterba <dsterba@suse.cz>]

On Fri, Feb 21, 2025 at 11:45:31PM +0800, Zorro Lang wrote:
> > This may bring the question what is the policy for filesystem support.
> > I've seen "case $FSTYP" with widely inconsistent cases of filesystems,
> > probably the longest list is in common/rc:_require_scratch_nocheck with
> > 9p, virtiofs, afs, pvfs2 or ubifs.  It would be good to document that in
> > README, I haven't found anything in that regard.
> 
> Good idea, maybe we should have a list about that.
> 
> There's not a limitation about what filesystems are supported or not.
> Especially the generic test cases, some "not in list" filesystems might
> run generic tests too. So we don't exclude any filesystem which wants
> to try fstests.
> 
> Generally when someone wants to help fstests to support a new filesystem,
> there're 3 phases:
> 1) Check if fstests can mkfs, mount, unmount and fsck on this fs natively.
>    If it can't, add the fs to the "case...esac" list, to do special treatment.
> 2) Run generic test case on the new fs, fix some test failures which are
>    not suitable for this fs.
> 3) Add more test cases for this fs, might need a new tests/$FSTYP directory
>    and more common helpers.
> 
> Actually some of filesystems which are "supported" by xfstests, just satisfy
> the phase#1, or a few phase#2. That depends on how deeply that fs list
> would like to use xfstests.
> 
> But everything is still changing. For example, we don't support nfs much,
> just in phase#1. But as more and more nfs folks start to use xfstests,
> it's good to run on nfs now, even reach to part of phase#3. In contrast,
> although cifs is in the list, and xfstests can be run on it, but too
> many test failures, no one from cifs would like to care about that.
> 
> So about the "support list", what's the standard to count in a fs :)

Thanks, this is useful, can you please add this text to the README?