svn commit: r341505 - head/share/man/man5

[Rodney W. Grimes]

> On 12/5/18 12:06 AM, Kubilay Kocak wrote:
> > On 5/12/2018 9:51 am, Pedro F. Giffuni wrote:
> >> Starting with FreeBSD 12 we fully support writing ext4 filesystems
> >
> > Can we remove '2' from the module/man/etc name if (since) it supports 
> > multiple extXfs versions? Is there anything serious preventing it?
> >
> Bad idea: neither us or linux support the old extfs format. It is a 
> common misconception that ext3 or ext4 are different filesystems: they 
> are both extensions over the ext2 format and they were always intended 
> to work like that.
> 
> You can currently create plain ext2 filesystems on FreeBSD and add 
> ext3/4 features on top and it will work just fine. The distinction on 
> linux about ext2/3/4 is rather accidental: they didn't master Version 
> Control in time to branch instead of forking the implementation a couple 
> of times. It also seems like ext3 disappeared.
> 
> 
> > Seems minor but I think worth it for discovery/pola/obviousness, and a 
> > good time (early in the 13.0 cycle).
> >
> > We get a lot of user questions about ext*fs support on FreeBSD and 
> > pointing to an ext2fs man page also feels a bit weird.
> >
> This has to be "fixed" through documentation. I will admit that I 
> haven't been working properly on the documentation, other than trying to 
> remember some details in the Wiki page.

One simple fix would be to add MLINKS for ext3fs and ext4fs so that
you could refer a user to ext4fs.  Then manual page itself already
has a proper NAME entry, so infact hum, these links should already
be in place, that appears to be an oversight.

--- share/man/man5/Makefile.prior       2017-07-20 23:42:14.000000000 +0000
+++ share/man/man5/Makefile     2018-12-05 16:23:02.923541000 +0000
@@ -69,6 +69,8 @@
        tmpfs.5
 
 MLINKS=	dir.5 dirent.5
+MLINKS+=ext2fs.5 ext3fs.5
+MLINKS+=ext2fs.5 ext4fs.5
 MLINKS+=fs.5 inode.5
 MLINKS+=hosts.equiv.5 rhosts.5
 MLINKS+=msdosfs.5 msdos.5

> > Happy to get/organise a !committer contributor to take care of this if 
> > no-one wants to pick it up.
> >
> 
> I will be glad to review/commit manpage changes that make things 
> clearer. We should probably even try to document the format, as I recall 
> we do for FAT somewhere(?).
> 
> Pedro.
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Rod Grimes                                                 rgrimes at freebsd.org