Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Hans Reiser
2004-09-07T06:32:09Z

David Masover wrote:

>
> There are some things which can't be solved without patching. Version
> control is one such thing.

You can do most of the version control stuff without patching, for
instance selecting a version by name is easy (see Clearcase). Clearcase
users mostly do not patch user space binaries. But your point is
generally true that there are features that knowing about them allows
you to better employ them.

> But then there can be more generic patches
> -- as soon as the transaction API is done, you only have to patch apps
> to use that, and have a version control reiser4 plugin.
>
> | I'd go the other way around: Get userspace to agree on a common
> framework,
> | make it work in userspace; if (extensive, hopefully) experience
> shows that
> | a pure userspace solution has issues that can't be solved except by
> kernel
> | assistance, so be it.
>
> We already have such a framework -- it's called "VFS".

If doing it in the kernel is so hard, why hasn't it stopped us yet? ;-)

I am not asking other people to contibute their labor to making this
thing they view as infeasible work, I am just asking them to get out of
the way please, and let the users decide whether they like it.

Nothing significant about the reiserfs project was thought likely to
work by sensible people before it worked. I am a bit used to that.
After all, Oracle's IFS and several similar projects proved filesystems
on top of balanced trees cannot perform well....;-)

Anyone who complains about kernel bloat should first consider that
reiser4 is not by any means the largest filesystem in the kernel.

Hans