From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from userp2120.oracle.com ([156.151.31.85]:48100 "EHLO userp2120.oracle.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1731411AbeLTQDC (ORCPT ); Thu, 20 Dec 2018 11:03:02 -0500 Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2018 08:02:51 -0800 From: "Darrick J. Wong" Subject: Re: RFC: deprecate mkfs.xfs protofile functionality Message-ID: <20181220160251.GA27208@magnolia> References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-xfs-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: List-Id: xfs To: Eric Sandeen Cc: linux-xfs On Thu, Dec 20, 2018 at 08:34:25AM -0600, Eric Sandeen wrote: > I'd like to deprecate and eventually remove the protofile functionality > in mkfs.xfs, because it's not well tested code which is really a special > snowflake in the codebase that adds complexity. And as far as I know, > nobody uses it. It also would seem to barf out corrupt long format symlinks on v5 filesystems, as I discovered while cleaning up mkfs and repair yesterday. > If I'm wrong though, speak up now. Is anybody using protofiles? > > (If you don't know what a protofile is, then you're not using it. > And let's not turn this into a "well I could think of a way to use it" > discussion, because it's been there for a couple decades and if you're > not using it /yet/ ... unless there really is some new usecase on the > horizon which would clearly depend on it.) I'd rather have a mkfs feature that copies everything under a given path into a newly formatted filesystem, and even then only if there's an especially good reason why mount/cp/umount cannot be done. So I say nuke the protofiles in xfsprogs 5.0. :P --D > Thanks, > -Eric