Subject: Re: bug#39505: Adding filesystem utilities based on file-systems

From: Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2020 22:31:07 -0500

Hello Leo,

Leo Famulari <[email-masked]> writes:

> As discussed in #39332 [0], it would be great if filesystem utility
> packages were added to the system profile if a file-systems entry uses
> that filesystem type.
>
> For example, btrfs-progs could be added if a btrfs filesystem was listed
> in file-systems.
>
> [0]
> https://issues.guix.info/issue/39332#3

What is the use case?  Just having btrfs utilities to manage Btrfs file
systems, or is there some problems to avoid?  I know that for NFS you
must add nfs-utils so that the util-linux provided 'mount' is able to
mount NFS shares.

If the later is the use case, perhaps we could try to hard reference to
each file system utility in util-linux, instead of having it dispatch
some tool supposed to be in the PATH?  I'm not sure how difficult that
would be, and it'd for sure increase the size of util-linux, but perhaps
the pros outweighs the cons.

Maxim