When and why to deprecate filesystems [LWN.net]

When and why to deprecate filesystems

Posted Mar 18, 2022 13:40 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
In reply to: When and why to deprecate filesystems by mrugiero
Parent article: When and why to deprecate filesystems

That's ridiculous. We're talking about a significant engineering effort for something that is going to be used exceedingly rarely. And it's completely unnecessary too, because there's an obvious solution for recovering the data: just run an older kernel in a VM and copy the data over.

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When and why to deprecate filesystems

Posted Mar 18, 2022 14:49 UTC (Fri) by mrugiero (guest, #153040) [Link] (1 responses)

Suppose there comes a point where the intersection between supported filesystems is empty (we'll reach that point eventually, ext4 and btrfs will eventually be obsolete too), how would you copy from reiserfs to an actually living filesystem? Mounting in 7 other kernels?

When and why to deprecate filesystems

Posted Mar 18, 2022 16:49 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Something like tar or rsync over the hypervisor's networking would work just fine. After all, I can tar up a filesystem on a 1980s vintage UNIX system, or run PKZIP on a 1980s vintage DOS system, and uncompress the resulting archive on a modern Linux PC.