At 10:57 PM +0000 11/5/01, xs@nitric.net wrote:

>  Where did Kirk say he didn't wish it to be implemented in this fashion?

	FWIW, here's Kirk's initial response to my question on this 
subject (this came back so fast that I suspect that it may be an 
auto-response, but it's still interesting):

| I feel that having an /etc/fstab option is a lot of extra
| mechanism for very little gain. Administrators generally make a
| one-time decision to run soft updates on a filesystem. It is not
| the sort of thing that they want to change on a regular basis. It
| is possible to run tunefs on a filesystem that is mounted
| read-only, so it no more difficult to use tunefs than it is to
| make it a mount-time option (i.e., they still have to down-grade
| to read-only, set the option, then upgrade).  Finally, I expect
| that soft updates will eventually just be defaulted to `on' when
| a filesystem is built, and in a few rare instances an
| administrator will want to turn it off. I do not want to have an
| option that needs to be added to nearly every fstab entry to get
| the default behavior. Plus it is just one more bit of trivia that
| new system administrators need to learn to make their systems run
| well. The more of those details that need not be learned because
| they just do the right thing, the better. There are also
| technical reasons having to do with background fsck which needs
| to know if soft updates were in use when the filesystem was
| previously mounted. This cannot be reliably known if the
| /etc/fstab route is used.
|
|	Kirk


	I really don't see how you can argue with any of these 
points.  Of course, that's not really surprising -- Kirk did write 
the original FFS code something like twenty years ago, and he's still 
one of very few people on this planet that I would trust to get his 
hands back into the code at this kind of depth.  He really does know 
his stuff.  ;-)

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>

H4sICIFgXzsCA2RtYS1zaWcAPVHLbsMwDDvXX0H0kkvbfxiwVw8FCmzAzqqj1F4dy7CdBfn7
Kc6wmyGRFEnvvxiWQoCvqI7RSWTcfGXQNqCUAnfIU+AT8OZ/GCNjRVlH0bKpguJkxiITZqes
MxwpSucyDJzXxQEUe/ihgXqJXUXwD9ajB6NHonLmNrUSK9nacHQnH097szO74xFXqtlbT3il
wMsBz5cnfCR5cEmci0Rj9u/jqBbPeES1I4PeFBXPUIT1XDSOuutFXylzrQvGyboWstCoQZyP
dxX4dLx0eauFe1x9puhoi0Ao1omEJo+BZ6XLVNaVpWiKekxN0VK2VMpmAy+Bk7ZV4SO+p1L/
uErNRS/qH2iFU+iNOtbcmVt9N16lfF7tLv9FXNj8AiyNcOi1AQAA