We decided to further discuss section 1.2 (File System and Storage Organization) on the mailing list to prepare a final decision next meeting.
The text on hackmd is for an unknown reason broken. Instead to spend time to repair it I’ve transferred the text to our team page, a task we had to do anyway.
You find the text at:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/server-working-group/docs/server-techni...
Because it has not yet been finalized, it is not linked anywhere.
I have made some modifications to section 1.2 and taken up suggestions from Chris.
Some comments on our discussion and the draft.
I am convinced that a technical specification has to include a description and explanation of the properties and also a rationale if they are not self-explanatory. And the storage organization is on the one hand not self-explanatory and on the other hand one of the distinguishing features of Fedora Server.
A serious and genuine specification involves setting out goals and intentions and deriving technical properties from them (and justifying the effort involved). Otherwise, it would be a superfluous legitimization effort and a waste of time, which I would not be willing to do.
The text also does not restrict future flexibility (see Chris 17:7:41 UTC). In any case, we need to periodically review the techn. spec. We really shouldn't leave it for another 8 years or so. And then Chris is welcome to propose BTRFS as default again and maybe the technical and organizational realities will be different than when we last discussed it. And we are free to decide on a different rationale and implementation. Or maybe we can keep the basic principle and only change the implementation.