Re: joining the team

[Philipp Kern <pkern@debian.org>]

Hi,

On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 08:30:35PM -0400, Nicholas D Steeves wrote:
> I'd like to join the Debian Installer installer team to work on better
> btrfs integration.  Recently I've been working on a rename of
> btrfs-tools to btrfs-progs, and I submitted at patch for
> partman-btrfs.  The #1 feature I'd like to work on is support for
> installing to a btrfs subvolume.  The #2 feature is btrfs-style
> multiple device support in the installer.

that would be nice. I think submitting patches to the BTS is the right
way forward.

> I imagine #1 will be fairly easy.  At this point in time I believe
> that #2 should be limited to the raid1 profile, with mandatory
> duplication of both metadata and data.  Also, at this point in time I
> do not believe that compression should be supported.  Additionally,
> I've read bug reports recommending displaying a notice in the
> installer as to the experimental nature of btrfs.  That would be #3,
> but I'd be happy to re-prioritise it as #1

I think optimally the subvolume to install on could be preseeded for #1
and be able to reuse an existing btrfs volume. Similarly it'd be nice
if one could provide some sort of list of subvolumes to create at
installation time. (Although touching the partman receipe stuff for this
might be a bit messy.)

I don't think there needs to be such a scary warnings on the kernel
version stretch will ship with.

> The goal is to ship a "safest possible configuration", to enable those
> wish to use this next-gen filesystem to try it, while at the same time
> reducing bug reports that are caused by the current behaviour.  For
> example one of the "killer features" of btrfs is the ability to dump a
> subvolume as a FAR data stream.  This doesn't work out-of-the-box on
> Jessie, because the feature depends on a named subvolume.

But right now it installs into "@", no?

> I'd also like to discuss whether the default subvolume naming scheme
> should follow Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, or something else.

What scheme are they using?

Kind regards and thanks
Philipp Kern