bcachefs

You had an issue with bcachefs that kept you from running it; that's a legitimate thing to bring up. But I do - often - have to point out that there are things outside of my control.

Regarding the casefolding/overlayfs issue, it was bad form for one subsystem to be depending on global configuration of another subsystem unnecessarily. I only found out about that and started getting reports very late in the 6.15 cycle, and then I almost immediately started working on a proper vfs/overlayfs fix, because we don't want to be telling people "you can use your filesystem for docker, or Windows games - but not both". Doh.

When it turned out the overlayfs fix wasn't going to go in until the 6.17 merge window, I pushed a workaround in bcachefs (that I would have rather not added; it won't be needed when the real fix landed and those things are hard to remove) mid way during the 6.16 cycle.

So if docker/overlayfs was your issue, you should be good to go in 6.16. I apologize for the inconvenience, but when things cross subsystem boundaries it becomes more complicated.

(Side note: the number of reports I got about docker breakage when 6.15 came out was a data point that caused me to revise my estimate of bcachefs usage upwards. I did not expect quite so many reports; most of the people I talk to are running it on fileservers).

Now, I want bcachefs to stay in the kernel too, but I cannot control what Linus does.

I have to focus on my responsibilities: making sure that within bcachefs we're prioritizing robustness, reliability, and user support.

Admiral Rickover (father of the nuclear navy) had a lot of good stuff to say about engineering - one of them was, "if you cannot identify the person who was truly responsible, then no one was". I am responsible for the bcachefs code; what happens outside of my tree is a different story.

We are pushing back here against a culture and an environment which has not had this same attitude of responsibility - if it had, bcachefs would not need to exist.

And that's been the fundamental conflict here; we've had far too many pull request arguments over just getting in bugfixes for bugs that were affecting users, with no justification other than "bcachefs is experimental garbage that no one should be running" - while I'm talking to and supporting those users who supposedly do not exist every day. That's a situation where conflict is inevitable.

So, if you want bcachefs to stay in tree, and users like you to be supported, you're talking to the wrong person.