Re: Question about Reiser4

[Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>]

William Heimbigner wrote:
>> Eric Hopper wrote:
>>>  I know that this whole effort has been put in disarray by the
>>>  prosecution of Hans Reiser, but I'm curious as to its status. 
>>
>> It was in disarray well before.  Many of the reiser4 features,
>> like filesystem plugins, make more technical sense in the Linux
>> VFS, but made more business sense for Namesys as a reiserfs 4
>> thing.  That lead to a stalemate.
>>
> Shouldn't it be a matter of stability though? 

A lot of other things matter.  Things like a willingness to
maintain the code after it gets merged, or at least turning
the code into something the community is willing to maintain
if the original developers stop maintaining it.

> Benchmarks suggest that 
> reiser4 is a good file system; reiser4 is the successor to the 
> already-accepted reiserfs; we've got experimental ext4 support but no 
> reiser4 support, etc.

Namesys kind of abandoned reiserfs after work on reiser4
started.  Taking in a new code base on such a track record
is not a good idea when the code is not in a shape where
the community wants to maintain it.

> I don't see why something like plugins should matter. If it works enough 
> to be marked as experimental, why shouldn't reiser4 support be included?
> It's a pain for me personally to have to patch any kernel with reiser4 
> support so I can use the reiser4 fs.

You basically have three options:

1) keep patching every time you upgrade the kernel

2) use another filesystem

3) become the new reiser4 maintainer and turn the code
    into something that Linus is willing to accept

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