Per Jessen <per@computer.org> writes:
Christoph Thiel wrote:
I am assuming there are some official specs - otherwise how can someone say "we don't support JFS as root filesystem" and close the bugreport with that reasoning? So somewhere there must be a list of what is supported and what isn't?
Basically this spec would be the list of filesystem that you can choose from in YaST (during the installation).
OK, that makes some sense. Who decides what goes in that list?
Product- and Projectmanagement of SUSE Linux decided this for 9.3 and 10.0 - I'm part of that team.
Sure, it's none of a problem to add jfs to INITRD_MODULES
Well, that is _all_ I asked for in 115227. Nothing more, nothing less.
- but it is a problem to really support JFS!
I'd like to understand why it's a problem to support JFS - SuSE did it right up until 9.3, and given that it works fine, why has it suddenly become a problem now?
We really cannot support and handle all filesystems that are available. Offering it in YaST would make them supportable. It did not work at all with 9.3 and we fighted hard for a couple of weeks before giving up - JFS is not one of the major filesystems and seems not to get much testing from others.
Back to patches - let's assume I go fix this problem such that the Installer properly recognises that the root filesystem is JFS and can correct INITRD_MODULES to include "jfs". Seeing as the bug report was effectively rejected with "not supported", why would my patch be accepted??
In my opinion this patch could be something for future SUSE Linux OSS release, but it's very unlikely to get included in the SUSE Linux retail version, as we would have to support JFS then.
I have no problem with that - the Retail boxed version is obviously a SuSE product to which different rules apply. I would just like to understand if there's a risk of a perfectly good patch being ignored because "we don't support it" - after all, it would undoubtedly take me considerable effort to make such a patch.
It's easy to patch it in, we can do this in a couple of minutes. But since we're using the same code for the Retail box and for openSUSE, we do not want to change it. The whole issue that you arise above is something we have to think about - currently there's no technical solution for this, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, aj@suse.de, http://www.suse.de/~aj SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126