On Sun, 2008-10-05 at 18:09 +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote: > On Sun, Oct 05, 2008 at 09:11:13AM -0500, Serge E. Hallyn wrote: > > Quoting Adrian Bunk (bunk@xxxxxxxxxx): > > [ when to merge btrfs ] > > > Let's try to learn from the past: > > > > > > 6 days from today ext4 (another new local filesystem for Linux) > > > celebrates the second birthday of it's inclusion into Linus' tree > > > as a similar special-case. > > > > > > You claim "an early merge will accelerate its development and will > > > broaden its developer base" for Btrfs. > > > > > > Read the timeline Ted outlined back in June 2006 for ext4 [1]. > > > When comparing with what happened in reality it kinda disproves > > > your "acceleration" point. > > The btrfs timelines have always been aggressive, and as btrfs gets closer to feature complete, the testing matrix grows dramatically. I can't promise my crazy timelines won't slip, but I've been hacking away in the basement for almost 18 months now and it's time for me to get off the pot and make it stable. Ext4 has always had to deal with the ghost of ext3. Both from a compatibility point of view and everyone's expectations of stability. I believe that most of us underestimated how difficult it would be to move ext4 forward. Btrfs is different for lots of reasons, and being in mainline will definitely increase the pressure on the btrfs developers to finish, and the resources available for us to finish with. > > OTOH, maybe it's just me, but I think there is more excitement around > > btrfs. Myself I'm dying for snapshot support, and can't wait to try > > btrfs on a separate data/scratch partition (where i don't mind losing > > data). btrfs and nilfs - yay. Ext4? <yawn> That can make all the > > difference. > > "accelerate its development and will broaden its developer base" is not > about users/testers but about people doing code development. > People want btrfs for different reasons. I want btrfs in the kernel because when you're in the kernel more people look at it, and when people look at it they send me email with the mistakes they found. For example, see the streaming write patches I sent to fsdevel last week. I wouldn't test against ext4 as often if I had to hunt down external repos just to get something consistent with the current development kernels. ext4 in mainline makes it much easier for me to kick the tires. > For people wanting to try WIP code you don't need it in mainline. > > Stable kernels will anyway usually contain months old code of the > WIP filesystem that is not usable for testing, so for any meaningful > testing you will still have to follow the btrfs tree and not mainline. For ext4 at least, the mainline code is very usable. I hope to have btrfs in shape for that by the 2.6.29 merge cycle. -chris -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
