Offtopic to: LogFS merge

[David Collier-Brown <davecb@sun.com>]

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> The real issue for me wrt a filesystem is the on-disk layout.
> 
> If we know that on-disk structures need change, we shouldn't merge it. It 
> doesn't matter if that can be worked around with some backwards- 
> compatibiltiy flag: we should simply not encourage that kind of behaviour.

  I agree in particular, but not in principle (;-))

  Changing the filesystem format was something that happened at
least twice on Multics, on production machines. I happened to be
on during one of the changes and didn't even know it was happening
until there was a broadcast message warning of poor performance.

  I always thought that was cool, and got permission recently to
post a colleague's paper on it at http://www.multicians.org/stachour.html

  It would be cool if data could change at run-time on Linux, just
like security-sensitive code.

--dave
-- 
David Collier-Brown            | Always do right. This will gratify
Sun Microsystems, Toronto      | some people and astonish the rest
davecb@sun.com                 |                      -- Mark Twain
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