Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 67879
man pages make it impossible to discover mkfs
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:43:50 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 4.0; T312461) Description of problem: When adding a new disk to a system, finding fdisk to create the partitions isn't too hard, but the gap from there to mkfs is almost impossible to bridge. The mkfs command should be listed in SEE ALSO in the fdisk man page (and probably vice-versa). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Forget for a moment that you know the mkfs command exists. 2. Try to find the command used to format a partition as an ext2 filesystem using things like "apropos format" or looking in SEE ALSO sections for other disk related tools. 3. tear hair out :-). Actual Results: Became bald. Expected Results: Should have found pointer to mkfs somewhere before total baldness set it. Additional info: It just seems like there is a natural sequence of events here from fdisk to mkfs that should be reflected in the SEE ALSO chain in the man pages (maybe mkfs should point to mount and fstab as well).
It's really not possible to list every single command that might be relevant to every single other command, and mkfs & fdisk are just a little too far apart to be worth making this change. You're welcome to try asking the util-linux upstream maintainer, though.