On 5/2/18 8:42 AM, Ian Pilcher wrote:
On 05/02/2018 08:25 AM, Eric Sandeen wrote:
I've always seen the need for shrink as an indicator that someone had poor planning along the way, or insufficient tools for provisioning to start with. Sure, there are exceptions, but in general who needs shrink on a regular basis?
The point isn't so much that you need it on a regular basis, it's that when you need it, you *really* need it.
Given that it is exception activity, dump/mks/restore is also a less convenient but more robust solution to the problem.
I mostly want to point out that shrink permanently de-optimizes your filesystem, and carries some risk as well, especially if you have no backups.
I'll buy the poor planning argument on a server that does pretty much the same thing for the entirety of its life/deployment, but the case of a laptop/desktop that goes years without being reinstalled, and then unexpectedly needs tens of gigabytes of space to bisect a kernel bug is very different.
If you're putting your years-old root or home filesystem at risk to bisect a bug I'd humbly suggest that an external or additional disk might be more suited to the task.
I don't have any real horse in this race - if Fedora feels that shrink capability trumps features like reflink, that's fine. Just offering my thoughts on the matter, and trying to point out that shrink has its downsides.
-Eric