On Fri, 09 Jun 2006 15:45:16 EDT, Jeff Garzik wrote: > Gerrit Huizenga wrote: > > On Fri, 09 Jun 2006 14:51:55 EDT, Jeff Garzik wrote: > >> PRECISELY. So you should stop modifying a filesystem whose design is > >> admittedly _not_ modern! > > > > So just how long do you think it would take to get a modern filesystem > > into the hands of real users, supported by the distros? From community > > building, through design, development, testing, delivery? > > Start from a known working point, and keep it working... Then clone all the user level packages, work with distros to get the new packages included, update the man pages, get those included, make sure bug fixes for ext2 get propagated to ext4 - oh, and those for ext3 as well. And then work with mainline to decide when to change from EXPERIMENTAL to stable, then decide how to get enough users to make sure the testing is good enough, then work with the distros to enable, then work with them to agree to provide support to their most important, biggest, highest risk customers with this new filesystem used by only 20 people because it isn't the default. The repeat this whole discussion with each new feature proposed for ext4 over the next 5 years, watch developers get disillusioned yet again, watch 4 new competing filesystems pop up and try to be the next great filesystem. Watch them all fade away as the ultimately battle for mindshare wears them out and the ever cascading war between stability and support versus new features brings us back to where we are again today. Or just add the feature that the entire ext3 development community thinks is stable enough to move forward, is well enough integrated with the existing code to *not* be a bolt on, and is incrementally small enough to be managed by its very own developer community without the overhead of splitting that community even further. The short words sound good but in reality we should all have lived through this long enough to know better. gerrit - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
