Re: A modest proposal -- We need a patch penguin

Hans Reiser
2002-01-30T15:17:46Z

Rob Landley wrote:

>
>
>This is eleven "top level" maintainers, one of whom is handling ext3 which
>sounds kind of odd... (If David Miller is networking and Jeff Garzik is
>network drivers, would there be a "filesystem drivers" guy paired off with Al
>Viro? Does EXT2 go through Andrew Morton as well? Would Hans Reiser submit
>directly to you for ReiserFS patches, or should he get a signoff from...
>Um... Andrew? Al? Try to get it into the -dj tree first? Could I have a
>hint?)
>

There is a maintainers list somewhere in the kernel tree. I am listed
there as the ReiserFS maintainer, and I send our patches directly to
Linus and Marcelo. I don't think that a filesystems maintainer would be
easily achieved, since if we agreed about architecture we would have
written the same filesystems. We can't even agree about whether
streams and extended attributes should be implemented as files, and as
for whether keyword search and database functionality should go into the
filesystem namespace.....

So, there is a maintainers list, and for many subsystems it works fairly
well. For ReiserFS, while I review and approve all patches we accept,
Oleg Drokin is my patch whirlwind who does the work of testing and
inspecting line by line for bugs (I inspect more for desirable
functionality).

ReiserFS has been well-tended by Marcelo, so things are working well for
us. Dave Jones tends to 2.5 ReiserFS patches quite nicely also. None
of our 2.5 patches are earth-shattering, so I think it is very
reasonable for Linus to pay attention to, say, bio stuff for now rather
than our patches (I am sure he will eventually fold them in from Dave
Jones's tree.) I worry more that I haven't had a few hours to brief
Linus on the strategic direction of Reiser4, and what I think is needed
longterm to compete with Longhorn, but this is probably my fault for not
asking him for it.

I know that others have had real problems in this regard, and I don't
discount them, but ReiserFS patches are going well at this time.

Hans