On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 03:42:10PM -0600, Rob Browning wrote:
> The manpage says:
>
> -I inode-size
> Specify the size of each inode in bytes. mke2fs creates
> 256-byte inodes by default...
>
> but if I do this for a small test device (~64M):
Yeah, to be more annoyingly correct, 256-byte inodes are the default
except for small devices (greater than 3MB and less than 512MB) and
floppy devices (less than 3MB). These use 128-byte inodes by default.
And if you want to be even _more_ annoyingly correct, all of this is
assuming the default /etc/mke2fs.conf file. If the system
administrator edits the /etc/mke2fs.conf file, they can change the
defaults for many file system parameters, including the inode_size.
The challenge in documentation is how to give information which is
useful to the user, without overwhelming them with detail. Perhaps
the best we can do is to insert the weasel word "usually", or "for
most file systems". Or we could just delete the sentence about the
256-byte inode entirely, but that actually makes the documentation
less useful for most users (who are in general not creating small test
file systems).
All of this is documented in mke2fs.conf and in the description of the
-T option in the mke2fs man page, by the way. Perhaps not in the most
useful way, but it's actually a challenge to write good documentation
that is generally useful and easy to read, and doesn't cause users to
run away screaming....
If you have specific text contributions, they would be much
appreciated. Otherwise, I'll probably just insert the minimum
necessary so that the description is correct, since I am very much
concerned about overwhelming the user with so much detail that in the
end the man page actually becomes less, rather than more, useful.
Regards,
- Ted
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