NTFS3 driver is orphan already. What we do?

NTFS3 driver is orphan already. What we do?

[Kari Argillander]

After ntfs3 got merged and 5.15 got released ntfs3 maintainer has kept total
radio silence. I have tried to contact him with personal mails with no 
luck. I
have chosen bunch of people to discuss what we should do this driver as 
this is
already orphan. Feel free to add more if you think it is necessary. There is
lot of bug reports which are ignored completely. Lot of patches which nobody
applies.

He did some work after 5.15, but has not send PR for those [1]. I did 
also ask
to use fix and next branches seperetly and tag stable fixes, but he did 
not do
that eater. I think Konstantin did not yet quite understand meaning of 
stable,
next and upstream and it is not ok to applied every patch to same tree 
for any
point.

Personally I did my best try to help Konstantin with maintainer things, 
but I
have to say that it was quite difficult as he mostly ignored emails and 
do many
things like he wanted. He did not suggest anything to anyone if someone send
patch. He just applied those or ignored. Also sometimes he just applied own
patch without sending it to review process. Of course new maintainer 
needs time
to learn things but just wanted to say these so everyone knows how 
things went
so far.

I also did suggest that I could co maintain this driver to take burden from
Konstantin, but haven't got any replay. I have worker towards better CI 
system
for myself for ntfs3 which of course will be public in some point if we 
solve
current situations. If we keep this driver we really need very good fstests
support. But we also do not have very good open source utilyes for ntfs.
Konstantin said that he will open source those as well, but here we are 
waiting
and we will probably have to wait long time.

Now is time to think what we should do. Should ntfs3 just be removed? As I
really wanted to see that ntfs3 will be big thing I have to say that I 
vote for
removing unless someone comes to rescue this catastrophe. Yes we break
userspace, but we might break it silently if nobody is maintaining this. 
I also
do not believe that if someone is just accepting patches that it is enough.
Ntfs3 is not so ready that we do not need some ntfs specialist to 
maintain it
imo. Really public CI might save something if we keep this in and I will 
work
towards that if we choose to keep this in.

And if Konstantin read this please come and join this conversation.

   Argillander

[1]: https://github.com/Paragon-Software-Group/linux-ntfs3/commits/devel

Re: NTFS3 driver is orphan already. What we do?

[Linus Torvalds]

[ Sad state of affairs mostly edited out ]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 2:22 AM Kari Argillander
<kari.argillander@stargateuniverse.net> wrote:
>
> I also did suggest that I could co maintain this driver to take burden from
> Konstantin, but haven't got any replay.

If you are willing to maintain it (and maybe find other like-minded
people to help you), I think that would certainly be a thing to try.

And if we can find *nobody* that ends up caring and maintaining, then
I guess we should remove it, rather than end up with *two* effectively
unmaintained copies of NTFS drivers.

Not that two unmaintained filesystems are much worse than one :-p

           Linus

Re: NTFS3 driver is orphan already. What we do?

[Namjae Jeon]

2022-04-28 2:47 GMT+09:00, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>:
> [ Sad state of affairs mostly edited out ]
>
> On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 2:22 AM Kari Argillander
> <kari.argillander@stargateuniverse.net> wrote:
>>
>> I also did suggest that I could co maintain this driver to take burden
>> from
>> Konstantin, but haven't got any replay.
>
> If you are willing to maintain it (and maybe find other like-minded
> people to help you), I think that would certainly be a thing to try.
I can help him.
>
> And if we can find *nobody* that ends up caring and maintaining, then
> I guess we should remove it, rather than end up with *two* effectively
> unmaintained copies of NTFS drivers.
And I'm currently working write support on read-only NTFS(fs/ntfs)
with the goal of being released in a few months. And after that, I am
planning to start working fsck in ntfsprogs in ntfs-3g to solve the
current lack of utility issue.

Thanks!
>
> Not that two unmaintained filesystems are much worse than one :-p
>
>            Linus
>

Re: NTFS3 driver is orphan already. What we do?

[Kari Argillander]

On 28.4.2022 3.47, Namjae Jeon wrote:
> 2022-04-28 2:47 GMT+09:00, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>:
>> [ Sad state of affairs mostly edited out ]
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 2:22 AM Kari Argillander
>> <kari.argillander@stargateuniverse.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> I also did suggest that I could co maintain this driver to take burden
>>> from
>>> Konstantin, but haven't got any replay.
>>
>> If you are willing to maintain it (and maybe find other like-minded
>> people to help you), I think that would certainly be a thing to try.
> I can help him.

We have now discuss with Namjae and we will start this and let's see
where it goes. I will get my PGP signed soon. I really want code to be
in kernel.org so that maintainership is easily transfer if necessary,
but let's hope long and steady route now on.

Hopefully we are ready to start by next merge window.

     Argillander

Re: NTFS3 driver is orphan already. What we do?

[David Sterba]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2022 at 07:45:42PM +0300, Kari Argillander wrote:
> On 28.4.2022 3.47, Namjae Jeon wrote:
> > 2022-04-28 2:47 GMT+09:00, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>:
> >> [ Sad state of affairs mostly edited out ]
> >>
> >> On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 2:22 AM Kari Argillander
> >> <kari.argillander@stargateuniverse.net> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> I also did suggest that I could co maintain this driver to take burden
> >>> from
> >>> Konstantin, but haven't got any replay.
> >>
> >> If you are willing to maintain it (and maybe find other like-minded
> >> people to help you), I think that would certainly be a thing to try.
> > I can help him.
> 
> We have now discuss with Namjae and we will start this and let's see
> where it goes. I will get my PGP signed soon. I really want code to be
> in kernel.org so that maintainership is easily transfer if necessary,
> but let's hope long and steady route now on.
> 
> Hopefully we are ready to start by next merge window.

Feel free to ping me if you have questions regarding the pull requests
or would like to have it checked before sending. It would be
disappointing to see the NTFS3 module removed, thanks for taking up the
torch.

Re: NTFS3 driver is orphan already. What we do?

[Leonidas-Panagiotis Papadakos]

If Linux has to avoid having 2 unmaintained drivers, wouldn't it be better to
remove the old read-only one from (I think) 2001 and keep Paragon's version?

RE: NTFS3 driver is orphan already. What we do?

[Konstantin Komarov]

> From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2022 7:47 PM
> To: Kari Argillander <kari.argillander@stargateuniverse.net>
> Cc: Konstantin Komarov <almaz.alexandrovich@paragon-software.com>; ntfs3@lists.linux.dev; Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>;
> Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>; Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>; Eric Biggers <ebiggers@kernel.org>; Darrick J. Wong
> <djwong@kernel.org>; Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>; Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>; Linux Kernel Mailing
> List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
> Subject: Re: NTFS3 driver is orphan already. What we do?
> 
> [ Sad state of affairs mostly edited out ]
> 
> On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 2:22 AM Kari Argillander
> <kari.argillander@stargateuniverse.net> wrote:
> >
> > I also did suggest that I could co maintain this driver to take burden from
> > Konstantin, but haven't got any replay.
> 
> If you are willing to maintain it (and maybe find other like-minded
> people to help you), I think that would certainly be a thing to try.
> 
> And if we can find *nobody* that ends up caring and maintaining, then
> I guess we should remove it, rather than end up with *two* effectively
> unmaintained copies of NTFS drivers.
> 
> Not that two unmaintained filesystems are much worse than one :-p
> 
>            Linus

Hello Linus, Kari and all.

First and foremost I need to state that active work on NTFS3 driver has never stopped,
and it was never decided to "orphan" NTFS3.  Currently we are still in the middle of the process
of getting the Kernel.org account. We need to sign our PGP key to move forward, but
the process is not so clear (will be grateful to get some process desciption), so it is going quite slow
trying to unravel the topic.

As for now, we can prepare patches/pull requests through the github, 
and submit them right now (we have quite a bunch of fixes
for new Kernels support, bugfixes and fstests fixes) -- if Linus approves this approach
until we set up the proper git.kernel.org repo.

Also, to clarify this explicitly: in addition to the driver, we're working of ntfs3 utilities as well.

Overall, nevertheless the NTFS3 development pace has been slowed down a bit for previous couple
of months, its state is still the same as before: it is fully maintained and being developed.

And finally, we apologize for late reply; I allowed me short vacation after most restrictions because
of covid ended up this month in Germany.

Thanks.

Re: NTFS3 driver is orphan already. What we do?

[Kari Argillander]

On 1.5.2022 20.13, Konstantin Komarov wrote:
>> From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
>> Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2022 7:47 PM
>> To: Kari Argillander <kari.argillander@stargateuniverse.net>
>> Cc: Konstantin Komarov <almaz.alexandrovich@paragon-software.com>; ntfs3@lists.linux.dev; Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>;
>> Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>; Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>; Eric Biggers <ebiggers@kernel.org>; Darrick J. Wong
>> <djwong@kernel.org>; Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>; Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>; Linux Kernel Mailing
>> List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
>> Subject: Re: NTFS3 driver is orphan already. What we do?
>>
>> [ Sad state of affairs mostly edited out ]
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 2:22 AM Kari Argillander
>> <kari.argillander@stargateuniverse.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> I also did suggest that I could co maintain this driver to take burden from
>>> Konstantin, but haven't got any replay.
>>
>> If you are willing to maintain it (and maybe find other like-minded
>> people to help you), I think that would certainly be a thing to try.
>>
>> And if we can find *nobody* that ends up caring and maintaining, then
>> I guess we should remove it, rather than end up with *two* effectively
>> unmaintained copies of NTFS drivers.
>>
>> Not that two unmaintained filesystems are much worse than one :-p
>>
>>             Linus
> 
> Hello Linus, Kari and all.

Hello Konstantin and thanks for you answer. Happy to see that you are
still in.

> First and foremost I need to state that active work on NTFS3 driver has never stopped,
> and it was never decided to "orphan" NTFS3.  Currently we are still in the middle of the process
> of getting the Kernel.org account. We need to sign our PGP key to move forward, but
> the process is not so clear (will be grateful to get some process desciption), so it is going quite slow
> trying to unravel the topic.

Basically easiest route is some conference, but there is not so many as
we are kinda middle of covid still. You can try to search some Germany
kernel devs and contact them. Then you can meet them in person and
proof who you are and then they will sign you key. I'm same situation my
self right now and have meeting with some Finnish devs.

> As for now, we can prepare patches/pull requests through the github,
> and submit them right now (we have quite a bunch of fixes
> for new Kernels support, bugfixes and fstests fixes) -- if Linus approves this approach
> until we set up the proper git.kernel.org repo.

It should not be problem to continue using Github. Kernel.org is of
course nice in case example maintainership is transfer to others or
there is multiple maintainers.

> Also, to clarify this explicitly: in addition to the driver, we're working of ntfs3 utilities as well.

Nice to hear :)

> Overall, nevertheless the NTFS3 development pace has been slowed down a bit for previous couple
> of months, its state is still the same as before: it is fully maintained and being developed.

I have to disagree that it is fully maintained right now. Half year
radio silence is not "fully maintained". But we can work this out so
that this driver will be fully maintained.

But the offer is still that you do not have to maintain this fully by
yourself if this is too much work. There is many other subsystem where
there are multiple maintainers.

Also I would like to point once again that we really need to check that
stable gets fixes also. But those are just what are fixes not new
features. Also only merge window should be new code. Every other should
should only contain fixes. This is why usually couple different branch
is needed. If you have any questions please feel to always ask me or
from mailing list.

     Argillander

> And finally, we apologize for late reply; I allowed me short vacation after most restrictions because
> of covid ended up this month in Germany.
> 
> Thanks.