Re: e2fsprogs as Essential: yes?

[Ted Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 10:42:09PM +0000, Mark Hymers wrote:
> 
> The only other thing I can see is that e2fsprogs contains lsattr and
> chattr - a quick grep through my local /var/lib/dpkg/info shows that
> chattr is used in the postfix postinst without an explicit dependency.
> I wonder if there are more instances of that?

What to do with lsattr and chattr is actually a somewhat interesting
question.  They are most definitely ext2/3/4 specific, and the
ext2/3/4 development team still adds new flags to it from time to
time, so we had no plans moving those two commands out of e2fsprogs
any time soon.  On the other hand, other file systems, including
reiserfs and btrfs, have used the same ioctl and command line
interface, and we do coordinate flags to prevent conflicts.  So other
users of other file systems will still need lsattr and chattr.

There are similar, although less serious, issues with filefrag -v
(which will work on other file systems), but which also has some
ext2/3/4 specific code it in.

Another binary which is used by other packages includes the logsave
utility, which is also in e2fsprogs, and which is used by
/etc/init.d/checkfs.sh and /etc/init.d/checkroot.sh in the initscripts
package.

Regards,

						- Ted