Re: [f2fs-dev] [PATCH v6 0/9] Support negative dentries on case-insensitive ext4 and f2fs

Linus Torvalds
2023-11-20T18:08:12Z

On Mon, 20 Nov 2023 at 07:06, Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> My current understanding is that core dcache stuff is usually handled by
> Al. And he's got a dcache branches sitting in his tree.
>
> So this isn't me ignoring you in any way. My hands are tied and so I
> can't sort this out for you easily.

Well, we all know - very much including Al - that Al isn't always the
most responsive person, and tends to have his own ratholes that he
dives deep into.

The good news is that I do know the dcache code pretty well, and while
I really would like Al to deal with any locking issues (because
"pretty well" is not "as well as Al Viro"), for just about any other
issue I'll happily take pulls from you.

I dislike case folding with a passion - it's about the worst design
decision a filesystem can ever do - but the other side of that is that
if you have to have case folding, the last thing you want to do is to
have each filesystem deal with that sh*t-for-brains decision itself.

So moving more support for case folding into the VFS so that the
horrid thing at least gets better support is something I'm perfectly
fine with despite my dislike of it.

Of course, "do it in shared generic code" doesn't tend to really fix
the braindamage, but at least it's now shared braindamage and not
spread out all over. I'm looking at things like
generic_ci_d_compare(), and it hurts to see the mindless "let's do
lookups and compares one utf8 character at a time". What a disgrace.
Somebody either *really* didn't care, or was a Unicode person who
didn't understand the point of UTF-8.

Oh well. I guess people went "this is going to suck anyway, so let's
make sure it *really* sucks".

The patches look fine to me. Al - do you even care about them?

Linus