Talk:File Systems

Inclusion of USTAR

I have noticed a recent "edit war" regarding the inclusion of USTAR that lead to the locking of this article. While tar files are an important tool to be aware of and USTAR is a more than adequate file system for tapes and archives, it has some key differences to other file systems, such as FAT, ext2, or ISO 9660. While I do not think that USTAR should be removed, these differences should be noted. Otherwise beginners may be mislead into implementing tars as another file system in their VFS. Specifically, following things should be noted:

• The recommended way of manipulating a tar file is extracting it first into something else: into another file system or into a temporary file system in RAM.
• Due to lack of fragmentation, multiple writes can be extremely slow, they should be combined before writing back.
• For one-time read-only purposes, it's adequate to just load individual files, or the entire tarball, sequentially directly into memory.

In addition, the note "No standard partition type for it, you'll have to pick one on your own" may be misleading, since it suggests that one might have an entire disk partition in the tar format. While this is certainly a possibility, I can't see any adequate use case for that, even when bootstrapping, especially for a bootloader like GRUB, where one can easily load a tar file from the file system as a module. USTAR is an adequate file system for tapes, not disks.

I would have done those changes myself, however the article seems to have been locked. Please note I'm new here, but I have some limited experience on other wikis. However, it seems concerning that articles get permanently protected so easily. I hope this edit protection is not really indefinite and will be lifted eventually. --Lukflug 07:23, 9 February 2022 (CST)

Your first bullet point is dodgy. I wouldn't included it at all because I've seen bad results from taking recommendations seriously. The computing world is full of recommendations which are fine under most circumstances but harmful in others. Your other bullet points are good. The 2nd point gives a good idea of why and when you might want to extract files into another filesystem and the 3rd explains when you wouldn't. Neither of these burden newbies with recommendations to challenge their confidence. The rest of your comment seems to mix logical advice with opinion, and your opinions seem to be based on the fear that OSDev newbies will do the stupidest thing possible without firm guidance. :p While that's not entirely unfounded, I don't recall too many newbies trying hard to make a writeable tarfs. Eekee 10:40, 9 February 2022 (CST)

Yeah, I agree that I left the first bullet point a little vague and that the phrase "the recommended way" implies that someone authoritative is recommending it, even though that isn't the case. It could be rephrased as "tar files are usually manipulated by extracting it first into another file system", which is less prescriptive and more descriptive. My fear of beginners treating UStar like a disk file system (and yes, even making it writable) comes from my own initial misconception (I'm still very much a noob) and from my activity on the OSDev Discord server, where I saw many other beginners share the same misconceptions. And from what I have seen, these misconceptions stem from this article. Also, some didn't realize that it was the format for tar files, even though the "utility to create tar images" point should've given that away (so that might have been an issue of not reading). Thanks for the constructive criticism! --Lukflug 11:18, 9 February 2022 (CST)

I am banned from the OSdev Discord for reasons unknown, so I care very little what troubles people there are experiencing. I've made some edits to make it more clear what USTAR is and what its shortcomings as "filesystem" are, but I will defends its inclusion in a list like this. --klange 19:21, 11 February 2022 (CST)

I've edited the header of the USTAR page itself with some thoughts on why you would or wouldn't want to use it as a filesystem. It's rather shorter than my reasoning here. :) Eekee 19:38, 27 March 2022 (CDT)

I also want to partially retract my comment regarding eager edit protection. The protection log (which I should've consulted before publishing that comment), told me this is the first change in protection in 12 years :P. But I still find it weird to fully protect a page without any discussion in the talk pages. In addition, I have just noticed two minor grammatical mistakes in the page, that I can't correct due to the protection:

• "Widely used, utility to create tar images are available for every mainstream OS": "utility" should either be plural, or it should be written as "an utility [...] is available".
• "Implementation Available as static library": I'm also pretty sure "available" should be lower case.

--Lukflug 11:28, 9 February 2022 (CST)

I unlocked the page again. I primarily locked it to stop the repeated back and forth of reverts - I'm not too familiar with moderation tools on MediaWiki, but we don't seem to have too many options below full locking. That it led to a discussion on the talk page is good to see. I think the main reason we haven't messed with page permissions in a long time is that the wiki has been largely unmoderated - no one's had the necessary permissions until recently. --klange 23:00, 11 February 2022 (CST)