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

[Conrad Meyer]

On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 7:24 AM Pedro Giffuni <pfg at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 12/5/18 12:06 AM, Kubilay Kocak wrote:
> > Can we remove '2' from the module/man/etc name if (since) it supports
> > multiple extXfs versions? Is there anything serious preventing it?
>
> 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.

The Linux model is that the current incarnation of the ext2/3/4 driver
is named "ext4," and that's what Linux users expect.  You can mount
any ext2/3/4 filesystem with the Linux ext4 driver.  For ext4, it was
a result of wanting to keep ext3 stable while developing ext4 in-tree.
(For a while, it was called "ext4dev").  ext4 is long-since stabilized
and ext3 became fully redundant with ext4, so I guess they dropped it.

I think we should just follow that convention and rename ext2fs to
ext4fs.   We can mention support for the less-used ancient ext2/3 in a
COMPATIBILITY section or something, if we don't already, but ext4 has
been the go-to basic Linux filesystem for a decade.  (Seriously:  "On
11 October 2008, the patches that mark ext4 as stable code were merged
in the Linux 2.6.28.")  If we support ext4, call it ext4.

My 2¢,
Conrad