Re: [E2FSPROGS, RFC] New mke2fs types parsing

[Andreas Dilger <adilger@Sun.COM>]

On Mar 18, 2008  07:01 -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> If this is too confusing, one of the things which we *could* do is
> decouple the filesystem size from everything else.  "mke2fs -t" is a
> deprecated alias for "mke2fs -c".  We could make "/sbin/mkfs.ext4"
> equivalent to "mke2fs -t ext4".  Then we don't have to explain how
> the filesystem type handling prepends onto the -T arguments.

Note that "-t" is not listed in the mke2fs man page, but it is
still listed in the mke2fs -h usage line:

Usage: mke2fs [-c|-t|-l filename] [-b block-size] [-f fragment-size]
        [-i bytes-per-inode] [-I inode-size] [-j] [-J journal-options]
        [-N number-of-inodes] [-m reserved-blocks-percentage] [-o creator-os]
        [-g blocks-per-group] [-L volume-label] [-M last-mounted-directory]
        [-O feature[,...]] [-r fs-revision] [-E extended-option[,...]] [-qvSV]
        device [blocks-count]

> I rejected this approach originally because it would mean reusing the
> -t option right away.  But maybe this would be easier for users to
> understand, and easier to document in the man pages, and maybe that's
> an overriding consideration.

How long ago was it deprecated, and are there major distros that still
document/use this feature?  I suppose if the old code would fail with
any textual input (as used by new types), and the new code either
fails when no argument is given then it should be fairly clear if the
user has a conflicting usage.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.