Talk:File Systems

Inclusion of USTAR

I have noticed a recent "edit war" regarding the inclusion of USTAR that lead to the locking of this article. While tar files are an important tool to be aware of and USTAR is a more than adequate file system for tapes and archives, it has some key differences to other file systems, such as FAT, ext2, or ISO 9660. While I do not think that USTAR should be removed, these differences should be noted. Otherwise beginners may be mislead into implementing tars as another file system in their VFS. Specifically, following things should be noted:

• The recommended way of manipulating a tar file is extracting it first into something else: into another file system or into a temporary file system in RAM.
• Due to lack of fragmentation, multiple writes can be extremely slow, they should be combined before writing back.
• For one-time read-only purposes, it's adequate to just load individual files, or the entire tarball, sequentially directly into memory.

In addition, the note "No standard partition type for it, you'll have to pick one on your own" may be misleading, since it suggests that one might have an entire disk partition in the tar format. While this is certainly a possibility, I can't see any adequate use case for that, even when bootstrapping, especially for a bootloader like GRUB, where one can easily load a tar file from the file system as a module. USTAR is an adequate file system for tapes, not disks.

I would have done those changes myself, however the article seems to have been locked. Please note I'm new here, but I have some limited experience on other wikis. However, it seems concerning that articles get permanently protected so easily. I hope this edit protection is not really indefinite and will be lifted eventually. --Lukflug 07:23, 9 February 2022 (CST)