Re: [MAINTAINERS/KERNEL SUMMIT] Trust and maintenance of file systems

Christoph Hellwig
2023-09-25T09:43:41Z

On Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 02:56:45PM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> That's the best argument for removing all these old filesystems from
> the kernel that anyone has made so far.
>
> As it is, I'm really failing to see how it can be argued
> successfully that we can remove ia64 support because it has no users
> and is a maintenance burden on kernel developers, but that same
> argument doesn't appear to hold any weight when applied to a
> filesystem.
>
> What makes filesystems so special we can't end-of-life them like
> other kernel code?

Yepp. And I don't want to remove them against major objections. If
we even have a single user that actually signs up to do basic QA
I think it's fair game to keep it. Similar to how we deal with most
drivers (except for some subsystems like net that seemed to be a lot
more aggressive in their removal schedules).