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
