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

[Pedro Giffuni]

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.


> 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.