I would suggest that rather than making the single dump program smart enough
to handle all different filesystem types, you follow the lead of fsck and
make a generic "dump" front-end which determines the filesystem type and then
calls the apropriate dump.<fstype> back-end. This would allow you to have
dump.ext2, dump.ufs, etc, without making a single dump program so complex.
Ted writes:
> If you want to make dump use more of the ext2 library's features, that's
> probably a good thing. I would very strongly encourage you to keep the
> on-tape format compatible with the BSD dump program, however. Being
> able to exchange dump tape between BSD and Linux can be a very handy
> feature from time to time.
Actually, I was even able to restore an AIX mksysb tape (essentially a by-file
dump) on Linux using dump 0.4b4, so I think it very important not to change
the on-tape dump format - it might even be a POSIX standard, just like tar.
Now if only there was the ability to have the system boot from a Linux dump
tape, and re-create all of the partitions and filesystems ala AIX during
the restore, I'd be a happy camper...
Cheers, Andreas
-- Andreas Dilger University of Calgary \"If a man ate a pound of pasta and Micronet Research Group \ a pound of antipasto, would they Dept of Electrical & Computer Engineering \ cancel out, leaving him still http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/ hungry?" -- Dogbert- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/