Re: [Ext2-devel] [RFC 0/13] extents and 48bit ext3

[Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>]

Theodore Tso wrote:
> 	As far as people who want to use ext3 as the beginning point
> to do something that is has no forwards- compatibility, there's
> nothing stopping them from creating a jgarzikfs if they want.  But I
> think I can speak for most of the ext3 development community that we
> feel that one of the strengths of ext2/3 is its ability to do smooth
> upgrades (and in many cases, downgrades as well, when people need to
> migrate a filesystem so it can be mounted on older kernels), and that
> it's one of the reasons why ext3 has been more succesful, than say,
> JFS. 

When did I ever say smooth upgrades were a bad idea?

The whole point of 'cp -a ext3 ext4' is to ensure smooth upgrades 
continue.  A key theme is to avoid -backporting- all this new stuff 
that's going into ext4.  IMO ext3 shouldn't be a devel platform at this 
point in its lifecycle.

	Jeff