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Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 17:45:09 -0800
From: Luigi Rizzo <rizzo@icir.org>
To: current@freebsd.org
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Subject: userland|unprivileged file system handling tools
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We seem to lack tools that allow the generation/handling of file
system images without root privs. The 'standard techniques' used
to build the bootable floppies rely on vnconfig/mdconfig, disklabel,
fsck and mknod which all must run as root.

Colin Percival pointed me to ports/sysutils/makefs which builds an
almost correct fs image -- it has a couple of bugs, one which is
trivially fixed, the other one which could be cured by a pass of
fsck. There is still the issue of creating a label for the image
(which right now i do using a small C program), and handling device
nodes (not an issue on 5.x, but this could be possibly fixed with
some makefs extension).

So:

  + is there interest in having makefs become part of the
    standard system, instead of a port ?
  
  + how hard would it be to teach disklabel and fsck to
    work on files (filesystem images) as well as devices ?

cheers
luigi