Various notes on /usr unification [LWN.net]

Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Mar 6, 2012 11:37 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Various notes on /usr unification by rgmoore
Parent article: Various notes on /usr unification

I wouldn't mind something fstab-y but a little bit more modern. Fstab format is way too obsolete, there are no real notions of dependencies and ordering.

For example, Amazon EC2 nodes have specialized disks for scratch space. I want to assemble a RAID-0 of them, format them as XFS and then mount them on /tmp.

In my ideal world the fstab-ng would have entry like:
>none /tmp xfs defaults,noatime depends-on=assemble-scratch-raid

Where assemble-scratch-raid is, perhaps, a systemd task.

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Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Mar 6, 2012 21:48 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

I could definitely see a reworked fstab format. Even if you don't want to work in dependencies- there's some concept of ordering, at least- the format is also terse and cryptic. I wouldn't mind something a bit more verbose and readable. Just don't let Lennart Poettering get involved, or it'll generate another tempest in a teapot no matter how good an idea it is.

Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Mar 6, 2012 22:03 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

why would there be enough benefit in a more human readable fstab (which is mostly not manipulated by humans anyway) that would make it worth breaking all existing tools that understand the current format?

while I would agree that there are nicer ways to configure what's managed by fstab, there is a large pool of tools and training that know the existing format, what may have been a great change to make 30 years ago needs much more justification now.