On Thu, Jul 19, 2001 at 01:11:39PM -0700, Mike Fedyk wrote: > I thought that ReiserFS does journal the file contents. Can someone > point us to some docs that say for sure?
It is in the Reiser FAQ, iirc. I had to recently decide between XFS, Reiser, or EXT3. I've been using EXT3 for a few months now without any problems and it is by far the easiest filesystem to use if you're currently using EXT2. The ability to switch back and forth between EXT3 and EXT2 almost on the fly is nice. However, I wanted a filesystem with the ability to be expanded while it was still mounted. This doesn't seem to be an option with EXT3 so I decided to look at the other journaling filesystems. Both XFS and Reiser allows expansion while they are still mounted. However, theres no way to shrink an XFS filesystem, mounted or otherwise, other than the traditional way of backup/recreate/restore. Reiser filesystems, on the other hand, can be shrunk (though you need to unmount the filesystem before you can shrink it). So I decided to go with Reiser and so far I haven't encountered a whole lot of problems. Except one. Doing a "gzip -r" on a directory thats on a Reiser filesystem can return a non-zero error code which can break some Debian source package makefiles (which tries to run a "gzip -r" on documentation and man page directories before it deb-ifies the package). I looked at the gzip source and apparently this is a "bug" with the algorithm gzip uses to recurse directories, and not a bug with Reiser (which was what I originally thought). A simple hack to gzip to not return a non-zero error code if the "-r" is specified on the command line was the quick-n-dirty fix for this. - Arcadio
