Dr. Tweedie: I think you misunderstood, or perhaps I communicated deficiently. I assure you I was not meaning to insult any of the ext3 developers, or imply that ext3 was not stable, or designed with that in mind. If that was your impression, I emphatically apologize for any misunderstanding, whether my doing or not. When I say not out of need of users, I simply meant that users would want to use ReiserFS as well, not that ext3 would not be a viable choice to fulfill that need also. I meant that I believe that the initial decision not to provide ReiserFS as an installation option appeared to me to be a management / marketing decision as opposed to a technical one. I have no idea how RedHat tests its software, but perhaps that would be something worth telling people. I have been running RH for a very long time, long before it was a commercial product. I understand (and accept) that it is now, but that doesn't mean that some of the people running RH for a long time, whom are not large enterprises, cannot remember when RH did have a customer base that was not enterprises, and had a slightly different outlook. Lastly I'll just add that, I wasn't referring to the idea of having an easy installation to get ReiserFS working as a root filesystem (I did that absent the installer doing it for me), I was referring to the fact that, I would hope that RH will reconsider placing ReiserFS into RH in the future. When you say, "What on earth do you imagine we'd have to gain by promoting one open-source module over another for such petty reasons?", I say yes, I agree. In addition, I understand that SuSE is interested in the same enterprise customers that you are, with the same concerns for reliability, and somehow they had ReiserFS in their kernel, that is what made me wonder. I am sure they have the same concerns about supporting ReiserFS if it buggy than RedHat does. I really did not mean to insult anyone, just I like choice too, and I want to see that choice in RH distributions also. Very Respectfully, Stuart Blake Tener, IT3 (E-4), USNR-R, N3GWG Beverly Hills, California VTU 1904G (Volunteer Training Unit) stuart@bh90210.net west coast: (310)-358-0202 P.O. Box 16043, Beverly Hills, CA 90209-2043 east coast: (215)-338-6005 P.O. Box 45859, Philadelphia, PA 19149-5859 Telecopier: (419)-715-6073 fax to email gateway via www.efax.com (it's free!) JOIN THE US NAVY RESERVE, SERVE YOUR COUNTRY, AND BENEFIT FROM IT ALL. Sunday, January 13, 2002 4:38 AM -----Original Message----- From: Stephen C. Tweedie [mailto:sct@redhat.com] Sent: Monday, February 04, 2002 12:36 PM To: IT3 Stuart Blake Tener, USNR-R Cc: 'Larry McVoy'; 'Stephen C. Tweedie'; ext3-users@redhat.com Subject: Re: 2GB of Waste? How can it be? Hi, On Mon, Feb 04, 2002 at 12:16:44PM -0800, IT3 Stuart Blake Tener, USNR-R wrote: > In theory, I agree with your concerns about changing ext2/ext3, > but stability ought not to be the reason to never improve things. ext3's primary goal is stability. There are plenty of alternatives if you want bleeding edge. > I believe this choice was made, simply to promote ext3, not out > of the need of users. > Very Respectfully, Actually, no, it isn't --- you have flat out insulted the developers involved. What on earth do you imagine we'd have to gain by promoting one open-source module over another for such petty reasons? We evaluated both. Reiserfs crashed and corrupted data. We stress our kernels *very* hard internally. Remember, btw, that when we were freezing features for 7.2 --- well before when 7.2 came out --- reiserfs was still getting bug fixes for serious data corrupters every month. It was nowhere near as stable as it is nowadays. And ext3 can do online upgrade from ext2 filesystems, which is necessary for upgrade support --- reiserfs simply cannot do that. If you, or anybody else, or the reiserfs support team, wants to add reiserfs support to the Red Hat installer, you are all free to do so. The XFS team has done exactly that --- they have versions of the install images which support XFS for new filesystems --- and personally I'm delighted that they have done so. Choice is good. Red Hat tries to offer a reliable and stable base OS, not to add every possible bell and whistle to the distribution, and frankly our users get better value out of our development time if we spend it debugging the supported features than adding code for stuff we don't support. The big advantage of open source is that you don't HAVE to wait for us to add such features. Cheers, Stephen
