Re: [PATCH] staging: exfat: add exfat filesystem code to staging

[Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 02:41:36AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 08:39:55AM +0200, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 11:23:40PM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > > Can we please just review the damn thing and get it into the proper
> > > tree?  That whole concept of staging file systems just has been one
> > > fricking disaster, including Greg just moving not fully reviewed ones
> > > over like erofs just because he feels like it.  I'm getting sick and
> > > tired of this scheme.
> > 
> > For this filesystem, it's going to be a _lot_ of work before that can
> > happen, and I'd really like to have lots of people help out with it
> > instead of it living in random github trees for long periods of time.
> 
> Did you actually look at the thing instead of blindly applying some
> pile of crap?
> 
> It basically is a reimplementation of fs/fat/ not up to kernel standards
> with a few indirections thrown in to also support exfat.  So no amount
> of work on this codebase is really going to bring us forward.  Instead
> someone how can spend a couple days on this and actually has file
> systems to test it just needs to bring the low-level format bits over
> to our well tested fs/fat codebase instead of duplicating it.

I did try just that, a few years ago, and gave up on it.  I don't think
it can be added to the existing vfat code base but I am willing to be
proven wrong.

Now that we have the specs, it might be easier, and the vfat spec is a
subset of the exfat spec, but to get stuff working today, for users,
it's good to have it in staging.  We can do the normal, "keep it in
stable, get a clean-room implementation merged like usual, and then
delete the staging version" three step process like we have done a
number of times already as well.

I know the code is horrible, but I will gladly take horrible code into
staging.  If it bothers you, just please ignore it.  That's what staging
is there for :)

thanks,

greg k-h