From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Chris Mason Subject: Re: Honest timeline for btrfsck Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2011 22:50:50 -0400 Message-ID: <20111007025050.GA4767@shiny.Netlink.Wireless> References: <4E5FE9FC.9040705@cchtml.com> <20110901203442.GA17928@carfax.org.uk> <201109101209.40759.Martin@lichtvoll.de> <20111005061628.GA3702@shiny.elevennetworks.com> <20111005145843.GA4770@shiny.elevennetworks.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Cc: linux-btrfs To: Jeff Putney Return-path: In-Reply-To: List-ID: On Thu, Oct 06, 2011 at 10:31:41AM -0500, Jeff Putney wrote: > > No, in this case it means we're confident it will get rolled out. >=20 > On Aug 18th confidence was high enough to declare a possible release > that very day. This confidence turned into 7 weeks of silence > followed by another 2 week estimate. >=20 > These confident declarations are why things like mniederle's > btrfs_rescue are considered 'interim' and not worth building on. Had > this confidence of imminent release not been the prevalent message fo= r > the last year, others would have stepped in to fill the void. >=20 > > I've given a number of hard dates recently and I'd prefer to show u= p > > with the code instead. =A0I don't think it makes sense to put a par= tial > > implementation out there, we'll just have a bunch of people reporti= ng > > problems that I know exist. > > > > -chris > > >=20 > This strategy of 'Lone Wolfing it' has delayed the release by a year. > Either you are flying solo because you think that you can make more > meaningful progress without the involvement of the btrfs community, o= r > you are willing to forfeit the contributions of the community in orde= r > to not have to listen to any complaints. >=20 > The other problem of this flying solo plan, is that you are making th= e > assumption that the problems you know about are more significant than > the problems you are unaware of and could be flushed out with more > eyes on the code. The longer you delay the release of the source, th= e > longer it will be until confidence can be generated that major issues > have been resolved. >=20 > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often [ Thanks for everyone's comments! ] Keep in mind that btrfs was released and ran for a long time while intentionally crashing when we ran out of space. This was a really important part of our development because we attracted a huge number of contributors, and some very brave users. =46or fsck, even the stuff I have here does have a way to go before it = is at the level of an e2fsck or xfs_repair. But I do want to make sure that I'm surprised by any bugs before I send it out, and that's just no= t the case today. The release has been delayed because I've alternated between a few different ways of repairing, and because I got distracted by some important features in the kernel. That's how software goes sometimes, and I'll take the criticism because it hasn't gone as well as it should have. But, I can't stress enough h= ow much I appreciate everyone's contributions and interest in btrfs. -chris -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" = in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html