ext4 in Intrepid?

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 09:32:31AM +1000, Chris Jones wrote:
> I've been following the development of ext4 for what seems like an
> eternity.
> 
> >From what I understand, the latest Fedora 9 release features ext4
> support. So too do many other popular distros. And what I can't
> understand is why Ubuntu still doesn't feature any support for ext4, to
> my knowledge.
> 
> I was hoping that the developers could shed some light on the reasons as
> to why. And will it perhaps make its way into Intrepid? If not, when we
> will see support for ext4 in Ubuntu.

The reasons are, in no particular order:

 * There hasn't been a driving need for it (contrast with, say, improved
   NTFS filesystem support)

 * It isn't stable yet.  The developers still recommend caution and lots of
   backups

 * Tool support (e2fsprogs) wasn't released in a stable version until last
   month (July)

 * The developers highly recommend tracking out-of-tree kernel patches, even
   for 2.6.26 (our current kernel in Intrepid)

It looks as if it may be worth a more serious look in the next release cycle
after 8.10.

-- 
 - mdz