Hi all, I should have done this a long time ago, so here goes.
Btrfs is certainly the best FS out there but btrfs(8) is a pain to use in scripts. That is, it talks way too much, exposes unparseable outputs and has inconsistent behavior. I strongly believe that the CLI may use a complete revamp, that is: think of the needed/wanted output. I actually ran into this frustrating behavior while writing butter (https://github.com/moviuro/butter). Eg: # btrfs subvolume create foo Should be silent. I don't want btrfs(8) to bug me about successful commands. Everything that is a success is silent. In its current form, btrfs-subvolume(8) would spat out a complete sentence in English that we don't need, which however contains a tiny bit of useful info: the path (though relative) to the new subvolume. A -v/--verbose option might be here a good idea to implement and the following behavior (just thinking out loud, I'm sure there would be lots of things to think about more precisely): # btrfs subvolume create foo # should be silent # btrfs subvolume create -v foo /absolute/path/foo # btrfs subvolume create [--details|-vv] foo PATH:/absolute/path/foo UUID:082df386-98c2-44d9-9012-07fb2b22ea20 [And whatnot] That's a first example. Same should go for all the commands. I have no idea how/where we could share about good/bad outputs (Google Drive? Framapad? git[hub|lab]?) Then come inconsistencies: compare the outputs of # btrfs sub create foo # btrfs sub delete foo This also needs to be taken care of, but it should be a by-product of thinking the outputs all over again. Behavior inconsistencies: some seemingly valid commands fail, because of some code that can be easily changed (I'm working on it in my spare time already, see https://github.com/moviuro/btrfs-progs/tree/getopts): The valid '--' doesn't work on every command, see 0aa796cad7ed3fce9d5964646a8f1f5a142b4989 here: https://github.com/kdave/btrfs-progs/commit/0aa796cad7ed3fce9d5964646a8f1f5a142b4989 That's it. And since AFAICT btrfs is FLOSS, I'm sharing about my experience as user and hope my opinion will change btrfs(8) for the better. Cheers, -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
