On 1 Aug 2003, Sean Middleditch wrote:

On Fri, 2003-08-01 at 15:56, Jaime Diaz wrote:

...

I would love the possibility of choosing other filesystems besides ext2 and ext3. Specifically ReiserFS.

Seriously, at least read the archives before this kind of post. It's been said that other file systems are not offered because of quality and development/testing time.

More specifically now that Red Hat Inc still does all the work on Red Hat Linux we simply don't want to commit ourselves to doing so much work that we would no longer have time left to get the quality right.

Of course, once the distribution has moved to an open source development model it will be possible to support reiserfs, as long as people volunteer to do that work...

On Sat, Aug 02, 2003 at 11:58:31PM +0100, Robin Green wrote:

On Sat, Aug 02, 2003 at 04:12:07PM -0400, Rik van Riel wrote:

...

Of course, once the distribution has moved to an open source development model it will be possible to support reiserfs, as long as people volunteer to do that work...

Great! :) Hypothetically, what would be involved in supporting it? What would a person have to commit to doing?

Not that I'm volunteering - I'd probably be way out of my depth. But just attempting to stir up some interest here.

Hmm, there are actually a lot of questions here.

But in terms of reverting to where we were before for reiserfs, disabling "linux reiserfs" for installs was an unintended consequence of something else (kernel-unsupported). We're thinking about that...

Then there's the question of "what do we *encourage* users to use?" which we'll still want to be picky about -- getting to the question of "editorial control" and having developers have a shared vision about what we are trying to do. Even if our reservations about the reliability of reiserfs were answered, we'd still have the issue that new versions of reiserfs keep changing the on-disk format, whereas we have consistently held the opinion that data portability is important.

For now, someone wanting to help resolve user bug reports in reiserfs should do three things: subscribe to rhl-devel-list to discuss, subscribe to rhl-beta-list and rhl-list to help users, and run regular bugzilla queries for recent bugs filed against kernel with subject text of "reiserfs" and look for bugs that need fixing. That would be a starting point...

I'd suggest that discussing contributing to the development process would be better done on rhl-devel-list. Replies redirected...

michaelkjohnson

"He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book." Linux Application Development -- Ben Franklin http://people.redhat.com/johnsonm/lad/