Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Also note that the btrfs community of developers is not so small these days and rivals (if not surpasses) the size of the team working on ext4.

Just to answer your last question, we do not intend to "slow it down". Rather, we hope to speed it up considerably by adding developers, testing and users.

-- Ric Wheeler

There is no point in discussing the details of new ptrace features for the benefit of the debugger on a kernel list before the debugger community has come to some consensus about what they would really make use of. It would be counterproductive to start proposing and implementing random new half-baked ideas in the kernel without first being sure that they are things the debugger actually needs and the debugger developers will actually do the work to exploit. We've had enough of that already, leading to the current morass of ill-specified features that don't help the debugger people very much.

-- Roland McGrath

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Quotes of the week

Posted Mar 4, 2011 16:54 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (4 responses)

Allow me to understand... Does Ric's comment imply that there's a heated competition between Ext4 and BtrFS? Interesting that there's been a bunch of resources thrown at both for the past few years/kernel release cycles.

Not that I'm complaining, but I wonder if it'd be better to have all the resources dedicated to the one "best" filesystem. Perhaps having both FSes is A Good Thing™. Even Linus has mentioned asking "Why can't we do both?" in the context of Kernel development.

Quotes of the week

Posted Mar 4, 2011 18:00 UTC (Fri) by ricwheeler (subscriber, #4980) [Link] (3 responses)

Competition only in terms of resource allocation. Now that ext4 is stable and upstream, you will see more developers are shifting focus to the btrfs project.

ext4 is not going away and the developers of course will continue to support it and add features. Same for xfs of course :)

ext4 vs btrfs

Posted Mar 5, 2011 1:15 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (2 responses)

I've been reading in LWN for years that ext4 and btrfs are complementary -- ext4 being for the near term and btrfs for the long term.

Of course, Ric's statement that ext4 is not going away is inconsistent with that and does raise again the common question of whether it's wasteful on the whole to develop both.

ext4 vs btrfs

Posted Mar 5, 2011 1:23 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

What you heard is right except that "near term" and "long term" have sufficiently large values.

ext4 vs btrfs

Posted Mar 5, 2011 12:59 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Uh, of course ext4 is not going away. It's a filesystem. They hang around for ages, even when obsolete, because people have data in them. btrfs just has more potential, is all.