ReiserFS support removed from Ubuntu 13.10 installer => not even possible to mount existing partitions

[Thomas Dreibholz]

ReiserFS support has been removed from the Ubuntu 13.10 installer. It is not even possible to mount existing partitions in the installer. I do *not* yet want to use BTRFS for my data partition, since it is much more unstable than ReiserFS. And I do *not* want to use the old ext3/4, since its performance is worse then ReiserFS (directories with many small files).

At least, the installer should still allow to mount existing ReiserFS-based data partitions. Currently, it is necessary to install with BTRFS or ext3/4 and then manually add the existing ReiserFS partitions. If Ubuntu does not want people to use ReiserFS for whatever reason, print a warning and let users decide to use it. Just silently removing a feature is annoying.

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

partman-reiserfs package is the one that allows both debian-installer and ubiquity to mount/partition/use ReiserFS partitions.
It has been removed from Debian "(From Debian) ROM; now useless; Debian bug #717517" and also removed from ubuntu.

Please see: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=717517

[John Hunter (jmdh01)]

I am a third complainer. Luckily, I decided to try 13.10 on a spare laptop. I concur with the useless description. I am currently running on 12.04 which is increasingly showing its age: there are problems with "system settings" and the KDE community are ignoring problems with the older facilities (in particular, printer registration), so an upgrade is essential. There are issues with LibreOffice 3.5 which are beginning to force the issue. The creation of the /home directory in the root partition renders the installation as completely unuseable. Who was the bright spark who took such a daft decision? A partition tool is not needed when the disks are already set up; all that is needed are the reiser kernel modules! (reiserfs.ko is a mere 280.2kB!). Another oversight is the lack of synaptic -- muon, as its name seems to imply, is truly moronic!

[Steve Newcomb (srn-coolheads)]

Different users have different requirements, and you guys are creating big problems with us.

We've been using Reiserfs for over a decade due to its tail packing (we have many small files) and excellent inherent filesystem recovery. Our data have survived many hardware failures without resorting to backups. Actual experience with many servers over many years, in actual production! Not just theory!

Our experiments with XFS were disastrous; we lost a lot of data, and even after we bought proprietary tools to recover, must data were lost. That has NEVER happened to us with Reiserfs (reiser3).

WIthout tail-packing, ext4 is extremely disk-space-inefficient for us, with our jillions of small files, and when we boot, the machine may go off on a lengthy file system check, leaving us without access to a perhaps-urgently-needed host or its data. The alternative, of course, is to waste our precious human-time doing, egad, file system maintenance chores. That's crazy!

I guess we'll try JFS now, because it has tail-packing. But I note there's apparently nothing for JFS that's comparable to Reiser's free --rebuild-tree option. Just a project, jfsrec, that may or may not work when things go awry.

THIS IS NOT GOOD! Why take away something that's so important, so useful, so robust, so human-time-efficient, as Reiser3???? To save 200K on the installer disk? That's just crazy.

[Norbert Schulze (n-schulze)]

We use reiserfs for many oem-computers. Please give us a chance use it with 14.04!

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

On 22 March 2014 16:45, Norbert Schulze <email address hidden> wrote:
> We use reiserfs for many oem-computers. Please give us a chance use it
> with 14.04!
>

reiserfs is still supported by the ubuntu kernel in 14.04, thus one
can still image and preinstall machines in oem-like mode with
reiserfs. (See e.g. ubuntu-core installation methods)

However, I urge you to try out btrfs and/or xfs.

--
Regards,

Dimitri.

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

On 10 February 2014 14:26, Steve Newcomb <email address hidden> wrote:
>
> THIS IS NOT GOOD! Why take away something that's so important, so
> useful, so robust, so human-time-efficient, as Reiser3???? To save 200K
> on the installer disk? That's just crazy.
>

Reiserfs is still supported by the 14.04 kernel, thus existing
installations will continue to work a be upgradable.

You can use 12.04 LTS installers to perform installations and upgrade
to latest trusty. Also note that 12.04 LTS is receiving ongoing
support and security updates including optionally 14.04 LTS kernel and
X stack.

If you have bugs about XFS and/or btrfs, please file them to upstream,
as it is reasonable for them to be addressed by 2019.

--
Regards,

Dimitri.

[Norbert Schulze (n-schulze)]

> You can use 12.04 LTS installers to perform installations and upgrade
> to latest trusty.

Thats a compromise solution.

[Ivaylo (ivaylo-str82dhead)]

PLEASE bring back the option to select ReiserFS.