Re: Significance of high number of mails on this list?

[Austin S Hemmelgarn <ahferroin7@gmail.com>]

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On 2014-08-20 23:22, Shriramana Sharma wrote:
> Hello. People on this list have been kind enough to reply to my
> technical questions. However, seeing the high number of mails on this
> list, esp with the title PATCH, I have a question about the
> development itself:
> 
> Is this just an indication of a vibrant user/devel community [*] and
> healthy development of many new nice features to eventually come out
> in stable form later, or are we still at the fixing rough edges stage?
> IOW what is the proportion of commits adding new features to those
> stabilising/fixing features?
> 
> [* Since there is no separate btrfs-users vs brtfs-dev I'm not able to
> gauge this difference either. i.e. if there were a dedicated -dev list
> I might not be alarmed by a high number of mails indicating fast
> development.]
> 
> Mostly I have read like "BTRFS is mostly stable but there might be a
> few corner cases as yet unknown since this is a totally new generation
> of FSs". But still given the volume of mails here I wanted to ask...
> I'm sorry I realize I'm being a bit vague but I'm not sure how to
> exactly express what I'm feeling about BTRFS right now...
> 
Personally I'd say that BTRFS is 'stable' enough for light usage without
using stuff like quotas or RAID5/6.  So far, having used it since 3.10,
I've only once had a filesystem get corrupted when there wasn't some
serious underlying hardware issue (crashed disk, SATA controller
dropping random single sectors from writes, etc.), and it gives me much
better performance than what I previously used (ext4 on top of LVM).
As far as what to make of the volume of patches on the mailing list, I'd
say that that shouldn't be used as a measure of quality.  The ext4
mailing list is almost as busy on a regular basis, and people have been
using that in production for years, and the XFS mailing list gets much
higher volume of patches from time to time, and it's generally
considered the gold standard of a stable filesystem.


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