Re: silent semantic changes in reiser4 (brief attempt to document the idea ofwhat reiser4 wants to do with metafiles and why

[Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

On Gwe, 2004-09-10 at 06:04, Hans Reiser wrote:
> > Just one of many applications. Watch Joe-user save their word 
> > processing file sometime, they'll use spaces, quotes, etc.
> With great unhappiness they will.

Its only problematic for the command line users. The GUI doesn't have
some mysterious notion of meta-characters, it provides out of band
information on boundaries.

> This is why I just want to be left alone to tinker with reiser4. It is 
> faster than other filesystems. People should assume I know what I am 
> doing, and leave me to tinker in my little fs. 5 years later others will 
> follow, or not, I don't care.

See I don't care if you tinker with reiser4. I don't care if it turns
out to be a crap fs or a great fs. If its a great fs and scales and
unlike reiser3 can recover well from disk errors then one year I might
even use it.

I do care if you ask me to suffer core API changes for your research,
that in your economics world is an externality. Its a large negative
externality on the part of the userbase so the userbase objects. It
doesn't take a PhD in economics to understand this.

Alan