OpenSUSE considers dropping reiserfs

Posted Aug 8, 2022 6:42 UTC (Mon) by donbarry (guest, #10485)
Parent article: OpenSUSE considers dropping reiserfs

A sense of the timescale on which the kernel retains features is that Hans Reiser has already come up for one parole hearing, denied in 2020, and will have another one in early 2023. He's currently in a special prison that provides for medical needs, including mental health needs, which is perhaps unsurprising.

OpenSUSE considers dropping reiserfs

Posted Aug 8, 2022 8:34 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (7 responses)

Yes, and Reiser was sentenced in 2008 to "15 years to life", so he may be released in 2023 (I'm not sure how it works).

In my opinion ReiserFS users should have made their migration plans in 2008 (and SuSE should have deprecated it at that time). Almost all hardware from that time must have been upgraded long ago; they should have avoided ReiserFS on any new machine. Reiser himself was already deprecating it in favour of Reiser4, and it was all practically a one-man show.

OpenSUSE considers dropping reiserfs

Posted Aug 8, 2022 13:59 UTC (Mon) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link] (3 responses)

I'm not an expert, but afaik, 15 years to life in the US is generally considered a life sentence; only a small percentage get out.

It sounds like this removal is a good thing.

OpenSUSE considers dropping reiserfs

Posted Aug 11, 2022 3:42 UTC (Thu) by kena (subscriber, #2735) [Link] (2 responses)

This was gone into some detail at the time of conviction, as many people thought he was getting a sweet deal. Turns out that "15 years to life" can very much mean "to life," as the circumstances -- he proved he'd killed her by immediately locating her body -- were pretty damning. So what it does, in effect, is give the _chance_ that he could be let out earlier, but it's very likely he'll spend several more decades, if not his entire life, behind bars.

OpenSUSE considers dropping reiserfs

Posted Aug 16, 2022 14:39 UTC (Tue) by tome (subscriber, #3171) [Link] (1 responses)

> what it does, in effect, is give the _chance_ that he could be let out earlier

that generally requires remorse, of which Reiser has none

OpenSUSE considers dropping reiserfs

Posted Aug 16, 2022 16:22 UTC (Tue) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

Why would he? It's illogical.

OpenSUSE considers dropping reiserfs

Posted Aug 8, 2022 14:15 UTC (Mon) by gwolf (subscriber, #14632) [Link] (1 responses)

Although ReiserFS does carry its creator's last name, and he was the ultimate authority on its workings... Don't expect him to run back to coding (with as great skills as he had back in 2008) as soon as (and of course, if) he gets out. Also, the kernel today is not the same as the kernel 15 years ago. We should all accept ReiserFS had some neat ideas, but its time has gone, and it should be removed — probably in stages (first from the distributions, later from the kernel). It is not _that_ hard to move over to a different FS (given a multi-year timespan).

OpenSUSE considers dropping reiserfs

Posted Aug 11, 2022 15:08 UTC (Thu) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link]

It is also possible to convert from ReiserFS to Btrfs in-place.

OpenSUSE considers dropping reiserfs

Posted Aug 20, 2022 21:20 UTC (Sat) by roblucid (guest, #48964) [Link]

Well that happened but reiserfs had been the default in SuSE, I remember changing to ext4 for the system fs and the distro announcing that reiserfs was no longer possible to support.