https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220288 --- Comment #2 from Martin Vahi (martin.vahi@xxxxxxxxxx) --- Thank You for the answer. What regards to the line of thought that the behavior of fsck.ext4 is just fine as long as it asks the user for the "yes" for modifications then I think that it is a flawed line of thought, because from users point of view the fsck.ext4 is run WHENEVER THE FILE SYSTEM DOES NOT MOUNT DUE TO DIRTY JOURNAL and the end user will not start to do any "forensic analysis" to start thinking, if some change that the fsck.ext4 wants to do is OK or not, specially if it shows some kind of numbers as part of the question. From fsck.ext4 user's point of view the idea is very staightforward: if (<partition does not mount due to dirty journal>){ func_run_the_fsck_ext4_and_it_better_do_its_job_without_any_mystic_number_scribble() } and if some question about individual inodes does appear on screen, then just press Yes to get that "nonsense" out of the way. If the text with the question were "Are You sure that You asked the fsck.ext4 to modify the right partition, because according to our suspicionns You made a typo and may be You want to consider running fsck.ext4 on '/dev/sdc1' in stead of '/dev/sdc'?", then the end user has at least some meaningful text to think about before pushing the y-button. But if the question is, as You describe, about some i-nodes, then from user's perspective those questions are expected to be pretty much the same for both, correct "/dev/sdc1" and for the typo-infected "/dev/sdc", which means that the question about some inodes does not convey the message to the end user that there could be something wrong at the call to the fsck.ext4. Someone, who has self designed the fsck.ext4 may find the difference obvious, but for the rest of us, me being part of "the rest of us", it is NOT obvious that fsck.ext4 asks some questions about inodes if I have given device name in stead of a partition name to the fsck.ext4. To put it in another words, it is not enough for a commonly used tool like the fsck.ext4 to work correctly according to notes at some deep documentation, but it should actually detect probable user mistakes and draw user's attention to the possible end user mistake by using a message that even that kind of an end user, who has NOT read loads of documentation and NOT intimately worked with fsck.ext4, can understand clearly. A messaging format that it asks something about inodes in one case and does not ask that in another case is not clear enough messaging format to make the user suspicious enough about possible user mistake. Thank You for the anwer and thank You for reading my comment(s). -- You may reply to this email to add a comment. You are receiving this mail because: You are watching the assignee of the bug.
