Fedora 16 to use Btrfs as its default filesystem

Posted Jun 11, 2011 1:06 UTC (Sat) by rahvin (guest, #16953)
In reply to: Fedora 16 to use Btrfs as its default filesystem by arjan
Parent article: Fedora 16 to use Btrfs as its default filesystem

I wouldn't say it has no meaning. I would say it means something different than the casual assumption. I've always taken the kconfig tag to mean that the code isn't finished. I'd say people like you interpret "experimental" to mean dangerous when it means no such thing. In a world where commercial software is often released prematurely and full of bugs the "experimental" tag in kconfig goes against that grain but IMO their definition of experimental is much more appropriate than the one used in the commercial software world.

There have been a dozen items in the kconfig marked experimental long after the development was stable and mostly bug free, but it didn't lose the tag until the kernel dev's were confident the code was stable and bug free by their own definition. Frankly I like their approach much better than the typical bug riddled commercial software available these days.

Fedora 16 to use Btrfs as its default filesystem

Posted Jun 11, 2011 8:55 UTC (Sat) by Hausvib6 (guest, #70606) [Link] (1 responses)

Exactly, just like Gmail.

This is apt analogy :-)

Posted Jun 11, 2011 18:37 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Gmail actually lost "BETA" suffix when it acquired proper backup solution. It always kept three copies of data (it uses GFS, after all) and inter-datacenter replication (this is done to balance load not only to make sure data survives catastrophic fire), but... all that sophisticated schemes will only save your mail in case of hardware troubles.

Software

bugs had the ability to destroy everything anyway.

Once they added last line of defense (I think it was tape backup) and tested this thoroughly they dropped suffix beta. I think btrfs will need at least fsck befome it'll be declared non-experimental.