Re: Question about Reiser4

Andrew Morton
2007-04-23T17:40:46Z

On Mon, 23 Apr 2007 06:52:16 -0700
Eric Hopper <hopper@omnifarious.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 01:04:45AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > The namesys engineers continue to maintain reiser4 and I continue to
> > receive patches for it.
> >
> > Right now I'd say that the main blockages for reiser4 are a) the developers
> > aren't presently asking for inclusion (afaik) and b) lack of reviewing
> > effort from other kernel developers.
>
> If someone else started asking for it to be included and responded to
> requests for the various code changes required to increase its quality
> to the required level, wouldn't that be enough? Basically, if someone
> forked it.
>
> Or does it specifically have to be namesys engineers?

That's not where the problem lies - the namesys guys are responsive and play
well with others. But they haven't received any "requests for the various code
changes" in over a year.

And I'm in the same boat as most everyone else: I haven't looked at the reiser4
code in ages. Right now I don't have anything like a list of outstanding
technical issues.

To get it unstuck we'd need a general push, get people looking at and testing
the code, get the vendors to have a serious think about it, etc. We could do
that - it'd require that the namesys people (and I) start making threatening
noises about merging it, I guess.

Or we could move all the reiser4 code into kernel/sched.c - that seems to get
people fired up.