Re: Formal Reiser4 inclusion and todo list?

[Christian Stroetmann <stroetmann@ontolinux.com>]

Hello Ralph;
On the 02.08.2010 16:30, you wrote:
> Christian Stroetmann 2010-08-01 15:43:
>    
>>> I haven't looked at the code since several years. But as far as I
>>> have followed the development, all of the patch sets since then
>>> (April 2009) were only of cosmetical nature, or said with other
>>> words, to keep it coping with changes at different positions, like
>>> eg. VFS. And in a handful of blogs I got no additional/other
>>> informations, despite that the maintainer is working at a company in
>>> the field of another file system since the end of last year, so that
>>>        
> ...
>    
>> We always had the impression that he, like a handful
>> of other persons, was only here at reiserfs to mess up the R4
>> development, to work and make politics against this project, and to
>> disturb the developers and their businesses.
>>      
> I would like to thank E. Shishkin for his efforts to keep Reiser4
> breathing. I never had the impression someone wants to disturb
> development....
>
>    

That is a problematic part of IT-business, and insights, feelings and 
experiences for and in such situations can be best developed, if someone 
is directly involved.

>>> , and also that the opinions are that the project is dead.
>>>        
> I see an amount of features went into btrfs. And the skills of former
> Reiser4 developers also. Also Shishkin did his expertise on btrfs.

Yes

>   What
> never was discussed during efforts to get Reiser4 into mainline kernel
> development:
>
> The potentials of a never coming Reiser5 regarding semantics.
>    

Sorry Ralph, but: No, that's not right.
What we did is exactly what you have mentioned: We gave it ontologics, 
which includes semantics and ontology based semantics. Or let say it 
with other words: Our [....]FS is based on R4 and could be described 
very rough as H. Reisers vision of the further development of R4 in a 
Semantic[/Ontologic] Web style, which could be seen as the R5 you 
mentioned, but has now another name that fits better with semantics and 
ontologics.
And we have explained such a semantic feature in a discussion on this 
mailing list. But just right from the start we got the advice by the 
actual maintainer:
"Go away!"
Later, we were also heavily attacked by other members of this mailing 
list with statements like "stealing", "that's rude" and so on.
Since then we are not allowed to talk about our R4 based fork.

Please read also this whole thread again, especially the messages of the 
days 19.04.2009 and 20.04.2009.

> - As one can see at Christian Stroetmanns sites he has done some
> thinking that direction.
>    

We hade started around the 1995s while no one was really interesting in 
these kind of semantic, ontologic and ontology based technologies.
And we have not done some thinking, it was in fact much more.

> - As one can see watching the Nepomuk development, semantic development
> is hard, unprecedented and therefore has a very slowly ongoing.
>    

Sorry again, but: No, that's not right. The EU-funded research project 
Nepomuk is largely based on stolen technologies from my company (eg. 
ontology for file system). After the presentation of our Linux based 
distribution with an R4 forked file system, that we are not allowed to 
mention here, and the ending of the monetary support of the related 
research project with tax money we gave only in small steps new 
informations about our technology so that it couldn't be stolen further 
by that project, members of the project, a newer project, a company, or 
others. That's the real reason and has nothing to do with the technology 
itself, but in fact more with international governmental and industrial 
issues. Or said with oher words: We have the thumb on it.
Please, understand all that this kind of technologies, including R4, are 
no kindergarden games.

> Development of an all purpose filesystem mixed with an all purpose
> semantic feature seems to be too big of a challange yet.

We have to say sorry once again, but: No, that's wrong. Our R4 based 
file system is not only conceptually ready since 2006.

> Me, non developer, would faczinate a revived Reiser4 as a fuse-
> filesystem for experimental storage ideas! Some sort of database? A
> Nepomuk storage backend? I wonder if some NoSql projects out there have
> reimplemented Reiser4 techniques?
>    

Sorry, but: Our R4 and NoSql based file system is not only conceptually 
ready since 2006. Also, we had developed it, because several FUSE based 
approaches exist for these kinds of applications, but are to slow or not 
consistent from the point of view of their architectures. R4 has several 
features that fit exactly and a FUSE based R4 makes really no sense, 
because it is already a file system. Believe us, we were already there 
more than 8 years ago.

If the explanations were to harsh, then we beg for apologize.

With all the best and Yeah
Christian *<:o)   O>-<   -(D)>-<