In article <20060816000426.I28872@cargo-cult.k.bsd.de>,
Christoph Badura  <bad@bsd.de> wrote:
>On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 02:03:09PM -0700, Jason Thorpe wrote:
>> Yes, I realize that's what they're for.  However, it seems to me that  
>> they just don't belong there.  It's already screwy having the fields  
>> change meanings for FFS vs LFS.
>
>That is like saying that deriving multiple classes from a base class
>is "screwy" because the implementation stores different information
>at the same offset in the objects storage.

Most languages don't do this... They append the derived class' data.

>Now, there may be other pressing reasons why we want to give up this feature.
>However, I haven't seen them yet.

There is another use of the fields: fsck uses them to compute the prototype
superblock. But it does not seem to break anything when you get rid of them.

christos