Re: [RFC] Btrfs mainline plans

["Serge E. Hallyn" <serue@us.ibm.com>]

Quoting Adrian Bunk (bunk@kernel.org):
> On Fri, Oct 03, 2008 at 12:18:59AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:44:20 -0400 Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > But, the code is very actively developed, and I believe the best way to
> > > develop Btrfs from here is to get it into the mainline kernel (with a
> > > large warning label about the disk format) and attract more extensive
> > > review of both the disk format and underlying code.
> > 
> > For the record...  I have been encouraging Chris to get btrfs into
> > mainline soon.  Get it into linux-next asap and merge it into 2.6.29.
> > 
> > And do this even though the on-disk format is still changing - we emit a
> > loud printk at mount time and if someone comes to depend upon some
> > intermediate format, well, that's their tough luck.
> > 
> > My thinking here is that btrfs probably has a future, and that an early
> > merge will accelerate its development and will broaden its developer base. 
> > If it ends up failing for some reason, well, we can just delete it
> > again.
> > 
> > For various reasons this approach often isn't appropriate as a general
> > policy thing, but I do think that Linux has needed a new local
> > filesystem for some time, and btrfs might be The One, and hence is
> > worth a bit of special-case treatment.
> 
> Let's try to learn from the past:
> 
> 6 days from today ext4 (another new local filesystem for Linux) 
> celebrates the second birthday of it's inclusion into Linus' tree
> as a similar special-case.
> 
> You claim "an early merge will accelerate its development and will 
> broaden its developer base" for Btrfs.
> 
> Read the timeline Ted outlined back in June 2006 for ext4 [1].
> When comparing with what happened in reality it kinda disproves
> your "acceleration" point.

OTOH, maybe it's just me, but I think there is more excitement around
btrfs.  Myself I'm dying for snapshot support, and can't wait to try
btrfs on a separate data/scratch partition (where i don't mind losing
data).  btrfs and nilfs - yay.  Ext4?  <yawn>  That can make all the
difference.

-serge