On reiserfs and external attributes [LWN.net]

On reiserfs and external attributes

Posted Apr 29, 2004 6:16 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313)
Parent article: On reiserfs and external attributes

In Linux development the maintainer doesn't have nearly as much control as many of them would like to think they do.

being a maintainer gives you the right to make suggestions and incoporate other peoples code, it doesn't give you the right to say 'this code will never go into the kernel' becouse Linus always maintains the right to change anything he thinks needs to be changed, and if a maintainer is on the wrong side of this decision to many times the maintainer changes, either voluntarily as the old maintainer gives up (stomps away indiscust, etc) of involuntarily as Linus accepts more and more patches from the new guy until the old maintainers patches no longer apply to the kernel.

it's happened before and it will happen again

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On reiserfs and external attributes

Posted Apr 29, 2004 13:47 UTC (Thu) by jeremiah (subscriber, #1221) [Link] (2 responses)

If I'm not mistaken, didn't Hans stir things up when he first came out with riserfs and tried to get it included in the kernel. Sort of upseting a lot of people. He's like the RMS of filesystems. Briliant, but inflexible.

On reiserfs and external attributes

Posted Apr 29, 2004 19:17 UTC (Thu) by erwbgy (subscriber, #4104) [Link] (1 responses)

That's hardly fair. Here is an excerpt from what he said [1]:

"Not sure you want to ship a 3.0 without it. It is 50-150% faster than
V3, which makes it a significant competitive advantage. I forget how
much faster writes are, something well over 100% faster, and the newest
version is faster yet.

How do I put it. I'm the last straggler coming back from the hunt, and
I've got what looks like it might be a wooly mammoth on my shoulders,
and my tribesmen are complaining that I'm late for dinner. How about
helping me by cutting down a tree for the roasting spit instead? Think
thoughts of the poor hungry Microsoft tribe eating NTFS.
...
Oh, and it has features too, not just performance..."

Yes, there was lengthy discussion and some disagreement about including
Reiser4 in the 2.6 kernel (which some thought would be 3.0), but it was
not an unreasonable request, and eventually got included on merit.

I've always liked that "straggler coming back from the hunt" metaphor :-)

[1] http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0210.3/0603.html

On reiserfs and external attributes

Posted May 24, 2004 21:40 UTC (Mon) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Ouch. You can't have a more than 100% faster write -- it would complete before it's issued. ;-) (Yeah, I know, he probably meant >50%, i.e. that v3 is 100% slower than v4. I freely admit that nitpicking is fun.)

That being said, most programs could care less about which file system they're running on. Thus, uniformity of features is somewhat more important than purity.