There are two prolems with using -y.   First of all, the idea of giving
the user "these files may have been dmanaged" at the next login doesn't
work if these are access control files for controlling which hosts are
allowed to talk to a server, or other forms of security critical files
if the machine is running on unattended server configuration.   As
another example, suppose the filesystem contains a database or some
other critical application data which is now corrupt.  It may be better
to not let the system come back up, since there are many business
applications where serving wrong data is far, far worse than serving no
data at all.  (Think financial applications....)

Secondly, e2fsck -y won't always do the best job if the goal is to
recover as much files as possible.

I'm willing to consider adding a paremeter to e2fsck.conf file to enable
"reckless mode", which in preen mode blindly tries to fix everything
according to hueristics, with no care as to whether a system
administrator with human judgement could do a better job.   I am
concerned about this, because Ubuntu users seem to be more likely to
have disk corruption issues more frequently than I've seen from other
distro's.  Maybe it's because some segment of Ubuntu users are not as
careful about the sort of hardware they choose and are using cheaper
hardware (as the old joke goes, "whatever falls off the boat from
Taiwan, as long as its cheapest"); or maybe because people are
encouraged to file Launchpad bugs over hardware issues; or maybe its
because of a difference in the maintainance strategy of the distro
kernel.   So the problem with reckless mode is that they might lose
files without even noticing that something bad had happened (i.e., they
click away or delete the message of filesystem problems because they
don't understand it).   Of course these "less-clueful users" are also
much less likely to be doing regular backups as well.....

In any case, regardless of whether it is a good idea or not to provide a
"reckless mode" for e2fsck, upstart **MUST** display output which is
printed by the fsck drivers on standard output and upstart **MUST**
respect the fsck driver's wishes if it exits saying that a system
administrator should stop and look at the filesystem.  At least for a
server configuration (and I thought Hardy was going to be tagetted at
servers), this is a MUST.

-- 
fsck not repairing corruption on boot
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/209416
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