From: Theodore Ts'o Subject: Re: [PATCH] resize2fs: add debug switch to use old online interface Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2013 07:50:50 -0500 Message-ID: <20130114125050.GA5907@thunk.org> References: <50F05175.8060502@redhat.com> <20130112003027.GA9550@thunk.org> <50F0AF49.6010902@redhat.com> <20130112230427.GC19503@thunk.org> <20130114121049.GA3906@andromeda.usersys.redhat.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: Eric Sandeen , ext4 development To: Carlos Maiolino Return-path: Received: from li9-11.members.linode.com ([67.18.176.11]:43252 "EHLO imap.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756556Ab3ANMuz (ORCPT ); Mon, 14 Jan 2013 07:50:55 -0500 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20130114121049.GA3906@andromeda.usersys.redhat.com> Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 10:10:49AM -0200, Carlos Maiolino wrote: > the patch looks good, but I'm very concerned about how much problems this will > cause to stable releases and enterprise products which use to work with older > kernel versions but a lot of backports of new features/bug fixes. Probably > upstream stable releases will not be too much affected giving these features > (new resize interface) might never be ported to stable kernels, but how about > the backporters? This mightl cause a lot of confusion when changing the > major/minor versions needed here. > > IMHO, the new resize interface looks much better than the old one, and just > developers and users which do not have new interface should make use of the old > one. For developers I believe a resize2fs option is good enough to be used as > debug, and for users, well, if they do not have the new resize2fs, we should do > noting, once they'll use the old one automatically :-) Well, this environment variable was intended only for developers who would be doing testing. Note that I didn't bother to documenting both the older debugging environment variable, nor this new debugging environment variable. It would problably be a good idea for me to write up the changes in the resize2fs interface (i.e., the new resize ioctl in 3.3, meta_bg / 64-bit resizing in 3.7) in the ext4 wiki, if for no other reason so that less sophisticated distributions _know_ which commits they should back port so they can have a fully working resize2fs. :-) - Ted