On Thu, Jul 20, 2023 at 2:39 PM Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Thu, Jul 20, 2023 at 07:50:47PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > > > Then we should delete the HFS/HFS+ filesystems. They're orphaned in > > > MAINTAINERS and if distros are going to do such a damnfool thing, > > > then we must stop them. > > > > Both HFS and HFS+ work perfectly fine. And if distributions or users are so > > sensitive about security, it's up to them to blacklist individual features > > in the kernel. > > > > Both HFS and HFS+ have been the default filesystem on MacOS for 30 years > > and I don't think it's justified to introduce such a hard compatibility > > breakage just because some people are worried about theoretical evil > > maid attacks. > > > > HFS/HFS+ mandatory if you want to boot Linux on a classic Mac or PowerMac > > and I don't think it's okay to break all these systems running Linux. > > If they're so popular, then it should be no trouble to find somebody > to volunteer to maintain those filesystems. Except they've been > marked as orphaned since 2011 and effectively were orphaned several > years before that (the last contribution I see from Roman Zippel is > in 2008, and his last contribution to hfs was in 2006). One data point may help.. I've been running Linux on an old PowerMac and an old Intel MacBook since about 2014 or 2015 or so. I have needed the HFS/HFS+ filesystem support for about 9 years now (including that "blessed" support for the Apple Boot partition). There's never been a problem with Linux and the Apple filesystems. Maybe it speaks to the maturity/stability of the code that already exists. The code does not need a lot of attention nowadays. Maybe the orphaned status is the wrong metric to use to determine removal. Maybe a better metric would be installation base. I.e., how many users use the filesystem. Jeff
