Re: Reiser4 repackers

[David Masover <ninja@slaphack.com>]

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Andrew Clausen wrote:
> On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 11:41:16PM -0500, David Masover wrote:
>
>>>Are you familiar with convertfs?
>>>
>>>	http://members.optusnet.com.au/clausen/ideas/convertfs.txt
>>
>>How easy is it to get the blocklist needed?  It seems like Reiser4's
>>packing doesn't help here...
>
>
> The blocklist is only needed to find the blocks in the nested file,
> which is huge.  (I don't know anything about reiser packing, but
> things like tail-merging aren't a serious problem.)

Yet, it's still a problem.  You want a standardized way to map files to
underlying blocks, and before Reiser4, I'd say this was easy.  But now,
who knows what the FS does to bastardize the file on the way down?
Crypto/compression?  Tail-packing?  Stenography?  The possibilities are
endless...

>>In both of these situations, convertfs seems workable, but overkill.  I
>>mean, a proper resizer would leave the FS in a useable state no matter
>>which way it went or when power was cut.  Convertfs means that if I lose
>>power at any point during the process, I'm very likely hosed, especially
>>with something doing lazy writes like Reiser4 as the original FS.  And
>>this is all assuming it would work at all.
>
>
> You could do journalling in this process.  (This would slow it down
> considerablly, however!)  If you've got some nice gui like qtparted
> on a knoppix live cd, it could be quite convenient.

Compared to the FS knowing how to resize itself?  You'd get to take full
advantage of existing Reiser4 transactions, not to mention the speed of
chopping off unused space vs. rebuilding the entire FS.

>>These are not situations where enterprise users would pay thousands of
>>dollars to be able to do this -- they can afford to do a full
>>backup/restore, just throw hardware at a problem and make it go away.
>>These are the scenario where small users like me tend to give up, back
>>up, reformat, and never touch such an inflexible FS again.
>
>
> Small users are happy to leave their computer overnight.

Maybe you are, but newbies aren't.  Maybe you got it wrong?  Maybe you
got all your stuff moved around properly, but didn't leave room for a
swap partition?  Looks like you have to start over!

Unless the newbies are following a VERY specific recipie or VERY good
tools, this process could easily take a few weeks, instead of a few
hours with the repacker.  And that repacker looks easier to implement
than a noob-proof UI.  Of course, people who know tell me I'm naive on
both counts...

The current situation is not impossible, unless you want real users (not
fanboys) to choose Reiser4 over ANYTHING else.  Why would I choose
Reiser4+convertfs over ReiserFS 3 + resize_reiserfs?  Or even
ntfs+ntfsresize?

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