Comment Re:Open Source? (Score 1) 345
From reading the linked discussion (before people started having shitfits), a dev suggested removing extFS support as "an unnecessary feature"
A dev announced that extFS support had been removed in beta. To people protesting, they replied that the feature was going away full stop. They even modified the ChromeOS feature page stating that ChromeOS had ext support.
because of theoretical security issues
Because of FUD. Stating that supporting the ext file system poses a security issue is FUD: it is FUD by definition, and it is FUD in particular because ext is massively used in security-critical contexts including Google's servers and Google's Android operating system. Why, ext4's key developer is a Google employee IIRC!
and because it interfered with implementing file system renaming (which looks to be surprisingly tricky to do right).
Because they didn't want to implement the few lines of code supposed to invoke the already existing facilities that set the file system label. A thing that, for tricky that it may be, was done right by the Commodore 64's 1541 floppy drive OS, by MS-DOS, by all versions of Windows, by all Linux-based desktops, by AmigaDOS, by OSX, and probably most existing operating system.
In no time at all, objections were posted, some of them rather aggressive in tone.
One of the last comments before disallowing further comments was that they were looking into keeping extFS support, but throwing an error message if you try to rename an extFS volume, and possibly implementing extFS support in userspace for security reasons.
After the slashdot story was published, after my comment was written, when more and more people started stating, most of them politely, that removing ext support would make ChromeOS unsuitable for their work, and that they were upset because there was no credible explanation for the removal of the feature, only after that developers stopped ignoring their discontent and decided to leave ext support in for the time being, but still without writing the code required to alter the filesystem label.
All of this seems quite reasonable when considering what ChromeOS is and its usual usecase.
And when did I say otherwise? I even said the same thing in another comment.