On 4/26/2011 5:58 PM, shawn wilson wrote:
you know, i don't mind religious debates - vi vs emacs, mac vs windows, iphone vs android, fibre vs iscsi, trustedbsd vs selinux, and... xfs vs ext. however, i like an educated debate where both sides can site specifics and hard facts and not just say 'this is better because i say so' (yeah, stan, you got a bit more specific, but not much).
This thread wasn't actually a debate about filesystems. It was about an OP ditching a quality FS for a truly silly reason.
If you're interested in learning about the merits of each XFS, search the list archives, google, and hist the XFS website. There's plenty of information available. I've listed many/most of the benefits of XFS on this list many times.
so, unless someone can give arguments to why ext is better or why xfs isn't the default on any distro (that i know of), i don't see the point of this thread anymore.
XFS is the default filesystem on SGI supercomputers, which ship with either SLES or RHEL, customer choice. The reasons it is not the default filesystem on any standard distro has little or nothing to do with capability, but more with other non technical reasons. No Linux distro ever shipped with JFS either, and it was superior to EXT/Reiser in many many ways. BTW, it is Red Hat's stated goal to make XFS the default filesystem on RHEL at some point in the future. The lead XFS developer, Dave Chinner, currently works for Red Hat for this very reason.
Default filesystem choice by a distro team has much more to do with familiarity, continuity, and politics than features, performance, or limitations of an FS. Note that Novell made the decision to switch SLE[SD] from Reiser to EXT3 very shortly after Reiser killed his wife.
Debian team members have quipped in the past that Debian will ship with EXTx as the default until the end of time, currently determined to be 2038. ;)
-- Stan