svn commit: r214431 - head/bin/rm

[Juli Mallett]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 14:48, Alexander Best <arundel at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Wed Oct 27 10, Doug Barton wrote:
>> What may be a better approach is to confirm the fs' that DO work, list
>> them, and then add something to the effect of, "This feature is unlikely
>> to work on other file systems."
>
> i don't think that's a good approach, because then the rm(1) has to be changed
> everytime freebsd gets a new fs which works with the -P option. i think it's
> better to list which fs semantics DON'T work. so if freebsd gets a new fs,
> users simply have to know which semantics the new fs is based on and can decide
> for themselves whether the -P switch will work or not.
>
> so far the -P option doesn't seem to work for:
>
> - COW fs and/or
> - fs with a variable block size and/or
> - fs which do journaling

I really don't want to ask the average user to know whether their
filesystem is in-place block-rewriting or not.  That's just silly.  In
this case Doug is right; I don't think FreeBSD gets new file systems
as often as you think that it would be a big burden.  Having a general
description of the types of filesystem it can work on might be useful,
but a list seems more useful still.  Listing the types it can't work
on is backwards because that requires a user to understand the
dichotomy as well as knowing what kind of filesystem they don't have /
do have.  And for them to never get it backwards.  At least mount(8)
will tell you what filesystem you are using; there's no tool to tell
you the properties of your filesystem, and good luck easily-mining an
answer to the question of whether your filesystem fits into that
category from a manpage without introducing substantial confusion.

Maybe there should be substantial confusion around this feature,
though, since that's what it seems to be there for.

Juli.