Re: Fwd: ITP: e2defrag -- ext[234] filesystem defragmenter

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Phillip Susi <psusi@ubuntu.com> writes:

> Package: wnpp
> Severity: wishlist
> Owner: Phillip Susi <psusi@ubuntu.com>
>
> * Package name    : e2defrag
>   Version         : 0.79
>   Upstream Author : Phillip Susi <psusi@ubuntu.com>
> * URL             : http://launchpad.net/e2defrag
> * License         : GPL
>   Programming Lang: C
>   Description     : ext[234] filesystem defragmenter
>
>  As a file system is used, data tends to become more and more
>  scattered across the disk, degrading performance.  A disk
>  defragmenter simply re-organises the data on the disk, so that
>  individual files occupy a single sequential set of disk blocks,
>  and all the free space on the disk is collected together in a
>  single region. This generally means that reading a whole file
>  is faster, and disk accesses in general are more efficient.
>
>  To use, the filesystem must not be mounted, and you need to
>  back up your data first because if anything goes wrong ( power
>  failure, system crash, bug in the program ) your filesystem
>  is likely to be unrecoverable.

I've maintained this package in the past for a while and I stoped
because there was no upstream developement to support ext3/4
filesystems. It looks like you now took over upstream developement and
added implemented ext3/4 support.

Could I suggest coordinating with xfs_fsr (and whatever other defrag
tool is out there) to develope a common nameing scheme and interface. I
think it would be good to have a generic defrag, analog to fsck, that
then calls defrag.ext2/3/4 or defrag.xfs as appropriate. Have a single
cron job that can defrag one filesystem after another and so on.

MfG
        Goswin