On Fri, 2015-08-28 at 14:25 +1000, Dave Chinner wrote: > On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 01:58:23PM +0300, Ari Sundholm wrote: > > Do you mean why this patch is needed? > > Of course. > > Just because the answer migh be obvious to you, it doesn't mean it > is obvious to anyone else, nor is an empty commit message useful in > 2-3 years time when someone reads the commit and wonders "why did > they make that change?" > I understand. I had simply thought that a longer explanation was not necessary in this case. I was wrong. > > Because there are filesystems that > > do not support hard links (at least not yet, but may support symlinks) > > we would like to run xfstests on. > > > > I'd be glad to add this explanation and reroll the patches, but I > > thought this would be obvious from what the patch does. > > xfstests doesn't support any filesystems that don't have hardlinks. > Why we should carry dead code, at minimum, needs explaining and > discussing. > But it does support filesystems which don't support symlinks. What I did is just an analog of that for hardlinks. Our company develops filesystem implementations, some of which support symlinks or hardlinks, but not necessarily both - at least not yet. We have found xfstests immensely useful in testing both work-in-progress and established FS implementations and are integrating it as part of our regular testing framework. We try to contribute back as much as possible of those things that we find generally useful. I am strongly of the opinion that this patch *is* generally useful, as we are far from the only people developing new filesystems. This is why I do not find this patch to be dead code. The types of filesystems we work on might not always completely overlap with the typical features of the filesystems xfstests is usually run on, such as xfs, ext4 and btrfs, but I think the effort required to support our filesystems remains small enough to be worth it. It will definitely not be the end of the world for us if you don't find this feature generally useful, but we try to upstream as much as possible of what we think might benefit not only us, but others as well. > Develop the habits that make you a better software engineer - using > a "from:" line in patch submissions does not do that. Will do. I try to learn and hope to keep learning. Best regards, Ari Sundholm ari@xxxxxxxxxx -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe fstests" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
