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

[Conrad Meyer]

On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 10:47 AM Pedro Giffuni <pfg at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 05/12/2018 12:41, Conrad Meyer wrote:
> > 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.
>
>  From a linux user/marketing perspective you are right.
>
> Are we sure there will never be an ext5fs? I would hate to start moving
> a filesystem in the tree every time a new release comes out.

While I think we can be reasonably confident ext4 is the last one,
it's somewhat irrelevant.  Linux isn't spawning new extN's at anything
like the frequency we do releases; ext3 was current from about 2001 to
2008, and ext4 from 2008 to present.  On top of that, there's no
particular reason the source code location in the tree has to be tied
to the name of the driver, or that mount(8) couldn't do the right
thing given any "-t ext[234]" or "-t ext[234]fs".

Best,
Conrad