On 2018-06-08 17:38, Rodney Baker wrote:
On Saturday, 9 June 2018 0:23:29 ACST Richard Brown wrote:
[...]
If you start using another file system then I would expect that in order to administer it you would bring in the necessary toolbox to support it, and that includes what GParted would see the wrenches now needed.
Surely the RPM system has this capability? Surely dependencies aren't an all or nothing matter?
I do see your point about not always being online, but then again, wearing my sysadmin hat, I can't see starting to use a new type of FS without the supporting tools to manage it. And I don't see why things I'm never going to use are forced upon me.
What scares me is that logical consequence of mandating stuff like this, even if it is never going to be used, is that it is going to be simpler to just load everything in all the repositories that you have configured, regardless.
gparted requires a whole bunch of tools regardless of whether or not they're used by a system e2fsprogs xfsprogs jfsutils hfsutils nilfs-utils ntfsprogs btrfsprogs
If you removed all of them gparted would be rather useless..
And there is no magic RPM dependency flag that lets RPM psychically know all the filesystems that you have (or more importantly, going to have) on your system
Especially in the era of NAS', SANs' and software defined storage where block devices (with whatever filesystems contained within) could be dissapearing and reappearing at a whim
Your 'sysadmin hat' sounds old and moth eaten - we're in more and more of a devops world where a single sysadmin is unlikely to be in total control of what their developers & users are connecting to your servers, VMs, cloud guests, or containers.
I think in that case it most certainly makes good sensible engineering sense to have a system that could handle all supported filesystems
And in the case of btrfs, it's the default and the recommended for the root filesystem for openSUSE, so it would be insane to make it an optional dependency even if there was magic RPM filesystems-in-use & filesystems-in-future flags
I think you missed the point. When you **install** btrfs it should bring in the tools i.e. btrfsprogs should be dependency of btrfs, not gparted (and the same applies to other fs's), and it should be possible to install a system without it (i.e. to choose what filesystems and associated tools are installed or not).
But you don't "install" btrfs. You partition a disk as btrfs, or as something else. At the time of formatting, the tools must be available - so you need btrfs tools before. What you ask is rather more complex to implement. It could be the YaST partitioner module that somehow ASKS the package management module to install the rpm for the filesystems it created, later during the installation. I doubt this hook exist, and it would be complext to do. But the packager module would also have to scan all the existing disks in the computer to find out what filesystems are there already, plus those that are going to be created, and then decide what modules to install. I'll put my old, moth eaten dev hat on for a while, and I'll say, I'm not coding that. Little gain and a lot of effort :-P But surely they'll be happy to accept your contributed code to do it ;-) And mind, like you I'm not going to use btrfs anytime soon. But removing those tools automatically is far from easy. Maybe it would be possible to delete them after installation, if they are not flagged hard deps. I understand that nobody so far has come with a way of doing that - see <https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=953131> for instance. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 42.3 x86_64 "Malachite" at Telcontar)