Re: [Ext2-devel] [RFC 0/13] extents and 48bit ext3

Theodore Tso
2006-06-09T21:51:54Z

On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 02:24:10PM -0700, Joel Becker wrote:
> Heck, forget the name, just make the breakage more explicit. Do
> it at mkfs/tunefs time. "tunefs -extents" or "mkfs -t ext3 -extents".
> A mount option assumes that you can do with or without it. If you do it
> once, you can mount the next time without it and stuff Just Works. Even
> htree follows this. A clean unmount leaves a clean directory structure
> that a non-htree driver can use.

Agreed; I've was never a fan of how we enabled extended attributes
using a mount option, as it clutters the /etc/fstab line, among other
things. (I added the tune2fs -o feature so that default mount options
could be stored in the superblock to try to cover that design botch,
but the real answer is that extended attributes should never have been
done via a mount option, or at least not only as the right only thing
you had to do before the feature became enabled.)

The right approach is what we did with journaling (tune2fs -j or
tune2fs -O has_journal) and what we did with htree support (tune2fs -O
dir_index), to explicitly enable that feature, and that's certainly
what I will be pushing for.

- Ted