Re: [PATCH] e2fsprogs: misc: Remove broken whole device check

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

On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 04:56:45PM -0600, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> On Jun 1, 2015, at 4:39 PM, Richard Yao <ryao@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > 
> > From: Richard Yao <richard.yao@clusterhq.com>
> > 
> > Modern Linux major/minor numbering on block devices no longer conform to
> > the divisible by 64 rule for minor numbering. On my development system,
> > the correct number is 16. Consequently, this applies only to every 4th
> > drive on a modern system, which is inconsistent. That caused the
> > following bug to be filed against Flocker:
> > 
> > https://clusterhq.atlassian.net/browse/FLOC-2041
> > 
> > We could unconditionally pass -F to override this check whenever it
> > triggers, but that it would also override the libblkid check that
> > determines whether there are existing partitions, logical volumes or
> > filesystems on the disk, which seems unwise.
> > 
> > I propose that this check be removed because passing a whole disk to
> > mke2fs is a valid use case and given how long this has been broken,
> > users are already accustomed to the behavior where -F is not necessary
> > to format a whole disk as ext4.
> 
> I totally agree - we've been overriding this check for years, and
> I'm glad to see it go.  We have other mechanisms today to avoid
> users accidentally formatting the wrong device (O_EXCL, check for
> existing filesystems in interactive mode, etc.)
> 
> Reviewed-by: Andreas Dilger <adilger@dilger.ca>

Thanks, applied.

					- Ted