On 2026-08-04 05:50, Pascal Hambourg wrote:
On 04/08/2026 at 12:57, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote:
That's certainly a valid point. I take this to mean that you think we
should have technical arguments for one or another default, as opposed
to picking something just because someone else does it.
XFS cannot be shrunk. IMO this disqualifies it as default filesystem.
...er, Some of us do not like the boiler-plate defaults carried over by
the (lazy ?) hosting providers when they provision a bare metal and/or
virtualized/cloud servers instance(s).
Reiser4, likewise, cannot be shrunk. Yet, I have made it the default
file system in my later customized d-i, i.e., partman-base hack:
< https://metztli.it/trixie/partman-base_reiser4-default.png >
And, previously, I did override the Debian default ext/x/y file system
in provisioned servers by uploading my custom reiser4 image -- either to
be used in virtual CD/DVD ROM device and/or booting from the d-i image
residing in either of a two (at least) disk storage media in bare metal
instances, and repartitioning/reinstalling Debian on reiser4:
< https://metztli.blog/nochtli/boot-metztli-reiser4-netboot-on >
I have seen so many users need to shrink a partition in order to free
disk space for another partition. With XFS their only option would be
to reinstall and/or back up and restore.
Also ISTR that XFS is more memory-hungry than ext4, and read about some
operations which caused transient high memory usage. But maybe this is
not relevant any more with current memory sizes ?
Maybe the default filesystem could be made conditional to the
architecture, memory size, partition size... ?
And whether user selected d-i Expert Installation option [?] then XFS
should be the default. After all, users who subsequently resize their
partitions likely are novices who have not planned their partitioning
and likely would not appreciate XFS/Reiser4, either.
Note: the default filesystem type can be preseeded.
--
Best Professional Regards.
--
Jose R R
http://metztli.it
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Download Metztli Reiser4: Debian Trixie w/ Linux 5.17.15-3 AMD64
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feats ZSTD compression https://sf.net/projects/metztli-reiser4/
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Official current Reiser4 resources: https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/
