On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 12:16:53AM -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote: > Well, I think that what I'm suggesting (but it's late, and I'm tired, so > it's hard for me to tell for sure... ;) is that there is no special > anything. You simply take the specified -T arguments in order, and use > that as the search/override order for any setting found in the stanzas > specified. This would probably be simplest to code, actually, as well > as simplest to document, and even most powerful/flexible for the user. > > But, I suppose I can live with > > -T [fs_type,][size_type,]user_type[,additional_type...] > > which is reasonably clear, though... we just need to document that there > are 7 special stanza names in 2 categories, which the code will put > there *for* you if you don't put it them the right place, yourself. > It's just, IMHO, a more complicated and restricted specification for the > option. Well, the problem is that we need to be compatible with previous behavior, where the size type could be set automatically, and where the filesystem type was intuited from /sbin/mke2fs.ext3. So it was clear that /sbin/mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 should be equivalent to /sbin/mke2fs -T ext4 /dev/sda But in that case, then what should this mean: /sbin/mkfs.ext4 -T news /dev/sda1 The user very clearly wanted an ext4 filesystem, so we need to give him the feature flag settings in the ext4 stanza, but she probably also wanted inode ratio setting implied by -T news. ----- 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. If we do that, then we could just say that the size_type (floppy, small, default) is only used if there is no -T option at all. I would probably still do the chaining, just because I think it's a cool feature, but documenting it becomes simpler because it removes a lot of the special cases. 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. Regards, - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
