Is fsck obsolet for journaling FS? - Was: How do I Automount [snip]

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi Oliver,

On Sun, 29 Nov 2015 19:46:36 +0100, Oliver Grawert wrote:
>also since this is relevant for the thread, please note that
>technically /etc/fstab has not been necessary in years in ubuntu (try
>it, move it away and reboot, your system will be fine and properly have
>mounted all fileystems)

I doubt that Ubuntu automagically knows what partitions are needed,
what mount point locations to use, to share data between different
installs and which partitions require special options e.g. regarding
real-time audio performance, or if there should be the need to have a
tmpfs with non-default memory requirements, which swap to use, if any.

At least one time I needed to inform the install what to mount in what
way. If it should be possible to delete fstab, then the Ubuntu install
at least used the fstab one time, since this is the only location I
edited. What upstart did and what systemd does with the information it
got from my fstab is something completely different.

It's possible to use one fstab copied to different installs, to get some
special defaults, that just need a little bit of adaptation, waht ever
distro is used.

A few bad habits of a few developers are no reason to recommend it to
newbies. I wouldn't recommend a DE that uses configurations that aren't
human readable and/or manually editable, neither would I recommend to
drop fstab yet.

If portability and other features that make UNIXlike operating systems
that good are dropped and it's considered help, to recommend against
learning to use this advantages, then I don't consider this as being
user-friendly.

I'm still not convinced that periodically fsck could be dropped, but
even if it should be ok to drop it, I anyway will continue to recommend
usage of fstab, for the mentioned reasons.

Regards,
Ralf