Re: [PATCH 48/49] xfs: Add read-only support for dirent filetype field

[Geoffrey Wehrman <gwehrman@sgi.com>]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 06:59:21AM +0100, Ric Wheeler wrote:
| 
| As much as the community admires your brave willingness to protect us from 
| code that was entirely developed by Dave, that is not really how the 
| upstream kernel works.
| 
| Dave is pretty much without equal in moving XFS along these days and this 
| is a key feature that we are depending on.
| 
| Please don't try to create hurdles to other people getting work into 
| upstream, that kind of thing will lead to a fork of the XFS code base and 
| ultimately that will be harder for all of us.
| 
| It sounds like what you really should look at doing is to work inside of 
| SGI to create a private, internal branch of the upstream code that you 
| deliver in your product. Upstream code is all about innovation and new 
| features, we don't let vendor specific, non-upstream branches become the 
| place for hardening our code.

I agree Dave is a gifted, dedicated, passionate and prolific contributor
to the XFS community.  His contributions are greatly appreciated as are
the contributions of all other members of the XFS community.  Dave does
stand out as the most significant code contributor to the project.  He
has played a significant role moving XFS forward both from within SGI
and from outside SGI.  This does not place his contributions beyond
review or discussion however.

My objection to the current readdir filetype field feature code is that
the feature is not being made available to mainstream XFS users, only
to those willing to run experimental code.  Dave has clearly stated that
he will not do the back-porting work.  I am not expecting Dave to do the
back-porting work.  Mark has volunteered to fill the back-porting role.
Th porting work cannot be completed as the feature is not yet complete.
The associated user space code changes have not been submitted,
and tests to validate the new feature have not been submitted.  I do
not consider this to be an unreasonable request, even if there were
back-porting required.

If Red Hat is depending on the readdir filetype field feature from Dave
and do not wish to wait for the feature to be completed before pulling
in the code, then perhaps Red Hat should create a internal branch of
the upstream code that you can deliver in your products.  The upstream
code should be stable and fully functional, not a place for incomplete,
partially tested, half finished work.


-- 
Geoffrey Wehrman  651-683-5496  gwehrman@sgi.com

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