I think this was the right thing

Thanks Jake, I appreciate it.

Well, if you'd like my take on who was actually using it: serious users, who were doing their homework first, would often come by the IRC channel (or Reddit) and ask if it was ready for use.

Up until recently (~6 months ago?), it seemed I was perpetually telling the people who sounded less risk averse to "check back in six months"; this included people who had been bit by recent data loss on btrfs even when we'd hit the point where similar data loss was going to be unlikely on bcachefs (that's never been much of a concern on bcachefs, although we used to have a lot of "downtime event" bugs, until those were worked through).

There have been a few people who clearly ignored the experimental label and jumped in much too early and ended up unhappy and disgruntled, but - the people who ended up the most disgruntled are also the ones who like to tout their storage industry experience, so can't say I feel much for those guys :)

Generally speaking it's been a lot of younger hobbyists/tinkerers, or older people with spare machines who know exactly why we need this and have been investing significant amounts of time QAing and beating on it.

And for all the people I can talk because I've been interacting with, I should also mention there's a much larger userbase who hasn't been pushing all the various features quite as hard for whom it's been working just fine.

So there's a good mix. Some people are legitimately using bcachefs in production - less critical or less demanding scenarios - some are testing the limits, some people are putting it onto any old junk and running real workloads (!).

Especially in the last six months, it's gotten sufficiently solid that the "people running it on random junk with real production workloads crown" have been coming up with all kinds of stories of it quietly and happily humming along through dying hardware and god knows what else that people seem fairly confident would have rather upset btrfs or even ZFS.

So I don't think there's any reason for people to be taking special precautions at this point. The only special precaution you ever needed to take was "if it wedges itself, be patient and feed us logs/metadata dump so we can get you bugfixes", and even that's pretty much stopped and the bugs have become pretty mundane.