Ext4 FAQ

[Bob Gustafson]

On Wed, 2009-05-06 at 00:44 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On 05/05/2009 04:08 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > On Tue, 2009-05-05 at 02:52 +0530, Gireesh wrote:
> >>> I had mistakenly assumed that this would be settable interactively.
> >>> In fact I don't quite see why it isn't.
> >> I rather prefer the current setup to manually specify "ext4migrate"
> >> a) Since ext4 isn't backward compatible to ext3.
> >> b) users when interactively prompted with a message to choose between
> >> ext4 and ext3, would most of the time choose ext4 because of the
> >> higher number without knowing the facts.
> > 
> > There's something to be said for that, however I think hiding it in the
> > Anaconda options will virtually guarantee that most people, keen to try
> > out their shiny new F11, simply won't see it.
> 
> I think it is better that way. A new filesystem is a big deal. People
> upgrading should ideally read the documentation associated with an
> upgrade to understand the details. If they don't, they are better off
> with the conservative choice.
> 
> Rahul
> 

Is there any way to decouple the upgrade to ext4 from the Anaconda
upgrade to F11. Some folks might like to upgrade to ext4 before the F11
upgrade, others would like to upgrade after their F11 upgrade is
successful. Perhaps also after /boot can be ext4 too.

What with RAID and all, upgrading to F11 has enough testing branches
without adding whether the user is going to ext4 or not.

A straight install of F11, without an upgrade of existing disk
partitions is a no brain ext4 install too. However, with /boot needing
ext3...

A straight install of F11, with existing (empty) partitions, perhaps
with RAID, could be ext4. However, with /boot needing ext3...

----

I'm for running ext4 upgrade separately from Fn -> F11.

Is there anything in F11 that absolutely depends on ext4??