Reiser4 inclusion and social aspects

Reiser4 inclusion and social aspects

Posted Aug 3, 2006 10:14 UTC (Thu) by Jorgen.Fjeld (subscriber, #1038)
Parent article: Debating reiser4 - again

A nice and technologically oriented article, however, the lack of
inclusion also appears to have less-technical reasons.

There has been a long standing problem that the reiser4 code has not
received a full review by a kernel hacker. This is mainly due to the
complexity of the reiser4 code, although the complexity mainly stems from
the new ideas of reiser4, the kernel hackers have been very reluctant to
accept code that they, apparently, have difficulties hacking
understanding, and therefore are unable to hack efficiently on. Much of
the debate has therefore focused on whether Hans and his team are
dedicated to the task of fixing and improving reiser4, instead of starting
on a new project, such as, reiser5.
Many of the topics discussed seems to boil down to the same problem,
reluctance to adopt a beast that is very different and very large.

Hans and his team has shown incredible patience with regard to kernel
inclusion, and they have been working on reiser4 for a long time. This is
a clear sign of their commitment. With such commitment I find almost
inevitable that they will continue to actively support reiser4 for quite
some time.

The goal of Hans Reiser is after all to further file system technology,
and so far he has been very hard working on reaching that goal. I tend to
agree with Hans that it is difficult to further technology without
creating a large and different beast.

In light of this it is very promising that Andrew Morton is reviewing the
reiser4 code, both for his comments that may improve reiser4, and because
he reveals more of reiser4 to other kernel hackers, which I believe is a
social prerequisite for kernel inclusion.

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