[parted-devel] hfs vs. hfsplus

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 7/15/21 7:11 PM, Brian C. Lane wrote:
> While looking more closely at the t3000 tests I realized that on Fedora
> we haven't had a mkfs.hfs for a long time... So the t3000 test hasn't
> actually been running.

We do in Debian. I actually reverted the change in hfsprogs which dropped
legacy HFS support in the Debian package [1]. Fedora is free to pick my
patch and include it in their package.

> It still seems to pass (whew!) but I've just sent a patch to make it run
> with the available filesystems so that if there is no mkfs.hfs it will
> still run the vfat test if mkfs.vfat is installed in the environment.
> 
> The other thing is this: Is anyone still shipping a mkfs.hfs? Is anyone
> not shipping mkfs.hfsplus?

Yes, we do support both in Debian. FWIW, hfsprogs in Fedora still supports
checking HFS and mounting it. Apple just disabled the mkfs feature for legacy
HFS.

However, since we need it in Debian for our m68k Mac support, I added it
back in.

> Should we switch to using mkfs.hfsplus and fsck.hfsplus (on Fedora
> fsck.hfs is a symlink to fsck.hfsplus)?

You could also run the testsuite on Debian :-).

> Plain hfs is ancient at this point, and if I'm reading the comments in
> the hfs resize code it is supposed to work fine with hfs+ so I think
> it's probably time to switch.

Can't comment on this one. But legacy HFS support should stay either
way so that Debian users on m68k Macs can still create and manage
legacy HFS partitions.

Adrian

> [1] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/hfsprogs/-/blob/master/debian/patches/0005-Re-add-support-for-creating-legacy-HFS-filesystems.patch

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz at debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913