Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Parag Warudkar]

>Now that Apple is going Intel, we will be forced to use whatever the Indians >provide.

What are the Indians going to provide that they didn't before Apple went the Intel route? I never knew we manufactured Apple hardware. Perhaps you wanted to say Chinese? Just curious... 

Parag

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Thu, 30 Jun 2005, Parag Warudkar wrote:

>> Now that Apple is going Intel, we will be forced to use whatever the Indians >provide.
>
> What are the Indians going to provide that they didn't before Apple went the Intel route? I never knew we manufactured Apple hardware. Perhaps you wanted to say Chinese? Just curious...
>
> Parag
>

Intel is moving everything (except sales and administration) to
India according to recent reports in EETimes.

>
>

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.6.12 on an i686 machine (5537.79 BogoMips).
  Notice : All mail here is now cached for review by Dictator Bush.
                  98.36% of all statistics are fiction.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Luigi Genoni]

maybe I don't understand the point.
where the problem is?

On Fri, July 1, 2005 13:29, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Jun 2005, Parag Warudkar wrote:
>
>
>>> Now that Apple is going Intel, we will be forced to use whatever the
>>> Indians >provide.
>>>
>>
>> What are the Indians going to provide that they didn't before Apple
>> went the Intel route? I never knew we manufactured Apple hardware.
>> Perhaps you wanted to say Chinese? Just curious...
>>
>>
>> Parag
>>
>>
>
> Intel is moving everything (except sales and administration) to
> India according to recent reports in EETimes.
>
>
>>
>>
>
> Cheers,
> Dick Johnson
> Penguin : Linux version 2.6.12 on an i686 machine (5537.79 BogoMips).
> Notice : All mail here is now cached for review by Dictator Bush.
> 98.36% of all statistics are fiction.
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
>  the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at
> http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/
>
>

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Luigi Genoni wrote:

> maybe I don't understand the point.
> where the problem is?
>

Apple's major claim-to-fame was that it represents an
"awesome, all-American computer", created by California
liberal entrepreneurs like Steve Wosniak and Steve Jobs.
Now, all engineering for the new platform will be done
in India.

It would be a major marketing slap for Jobs if the
new design was done in Indiana (USA), now it's going
to be done in India.

> On Fri, July 1, 2005 13:29, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
>> On Thu, 30 Jun 2005, Parag Warudkar wrote:
>>
>>
>>>> Now that Apple is going Intel, we will be forced to use whatever the
>>>> Indians >provide.
>>>>
>>>
>>> What are the Indians going to provide that they didn't before Apple
>>> went the Intel route? I never knew we manufactured Apple hardware.
>>> Perhaps you wanted to say Chinese? Just curious...
>>>
>>>
>>> Parag
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Intel is moving everything (except sales and administration) to
>> India according to recent reports in EETimes.
>>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Dick Johnson
>> Penguin : Linux version 2.6.12 on an i686 machine (5537.79 BogoMips).
>> Notice : All mail here is now cached for review by Dictator Bush.
>> 98.36% of all statistics are fiction.
>> -
>> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
>>  the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at
>> http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>> Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/
>>
>>
>
>

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.6.12 on an i686 machine (5537.79 BogoMips).
  Notice : All mail here is now cached for review by Dictator Bush.
                  98.36% of all statistics are fiction.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Luigi Genoni]

well, I see.

the low cost workmen are attractive to
every company, from everywhere...

anyway, will come the day when in rich countries there will be no work
for people not belonging to the middle/high class,
since all the industrial work will be done in the pourer countries, and
we will see a paradox of global economy.

On Fri, July 1, 2005 14:17, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Luigi Genoni wrote:
>
>
>> maybe I don't understand the point. where the problem is?
>>
>
> Apple's major claim-to-fame was that it represents an
> "awesome, all-American computer", created by California
> liberal entrepreneurs like Steve Wosniak and Steve Jobs. Now, all
> engineering for the new platform will be done in India.
>
> It would be a major marketing slap for Jobs if the
> new design was done in Indiana (USA), now it's going to be done in India.
>
>> On Fri, July 1, 2005 13:29, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, 30 Jun 2005, Parag Warudkar wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>> Now that Apple is going Intel, we will be forced to use whatever
>>>>> the Indians >provide.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> What are the Indians going to provide that they didn't before Apple
>>>>  went the Intel route? I never knew we manufactured Apple hardware.
>>>>  Perhaps you wanted to say Chinese? Just curious...
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Parag
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> Intel is moving everything (except sales and administration) to
>>> India according to recent reports in EETimes.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Dick Johnson
>>> Penguin : Linux version 2.6.12 on an i686 machine (5537.79 BogoMips).
>>> Notice : All mail here is now cached for review by Dictator Bush.
>>> 98.36% of all statistics are fiction.
>>> -
>>> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe
>>> linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
>>> More majordomo info at
>>> http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>>> Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
> Cheers,
> Dick Johnson
> Penguin : Linux version 2.6.12 on an i686 machine (5537.79 BogoMips).
> Notice : All mail here is now cached for review by Dictator Bush.
> 98.36% of all statistics are fiction.
>
>

Re: [OT] reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Parag Warudkar]

On Friday 01 July 2005 08:17, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> It would be a major marketing slap for Jobs if the
> new design was done in Indiana (USA), now it's going
> to be done in India.

Intel maybe moving part of chipset design to India but Apple still have their 
product design with them which they haven't announced they will move anywhere 
- or have they? 

I am not sure if Apple today designs and manufactures chipsets and CPUs in USA 
- most likely not, they buy it from IBM/Freescale. IBM/Freescale must have 
designed / manufactured the chipsets and CPUs anywhere - again most likely 
outside the US.  And from what I have heard Apple computers are assembled in 
China. 

So since long Apple's computers are designed in the US and manufactured / 
assembled outside of the USA. And that continues to be the case going 
forward, unless Apple announced they will move "their" product design to 
somewhere else as a result of Intel's move.

Parag

Re: [OT] reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Parag Warudkar wrote:

> On Friday 01 July 2005 08:17, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
>> It would be a major marketing slap for Jobs if the
>> new design was done in Indiana (USA), now it's going
>> to be done in India.
>
> Intel maybe moving part of chipset design to India but Apple still have their
> product design with them which they haven't announced they will move anywhere
> - or have they?
>

Their Web Page doesn't show anything new as a result of the Intel
deal. I understand that the Intel deal involved Intel-provided
hardware design in one of Intel's new campuses in India. Intel
has been in China for several years and established a $US200M
"China-venture" fund to bring 20-21st century technology to
China (broadband, semiconductor design, etc.)

> I am not sure if Apple today designs and manufactures chipsets and CPUs in USA
> - most likely not, they buy it from IBM/Freescale. IBM/Freescale must have
> designed / manufactured the chipsets and CPUs anywhere - again most likely
> outside the US.  And from what I have heard Apple computers are assembled in
> China.
>

Yes. Enough "final assembly", i.e., putting it in its shipping-box
is done in the US so they don't need a "made in China" label!

Similar to GE appliances.

> So since long Apple's computers are designed in the US and manufactured /
> assembled outside of the USA. And that continues to be the case going
> forward, unless Apple announced they will move "their" product design to
> somewhere else as a result of Intel's move.
>

I think the US design is going away. I think in a few years, Silicon
Valley will revert to some plum trees with migrant workers picking
the crop. I might be able to buy an orchard at Apple's former site
for a few thousand dollars. I've got to start saving now, though.

> Parag
>

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.6.12 on an i686 machine (5537.79 BogoMips).
  Notice : All mail here is now cached for review by Dictator Bush.
                  98.36% of all statistics are fiction.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Parag Warudkar]

> arjun kumar wrote:
> > Hey dick can you be a bit clear with this please. 
> > I don't understand how "apple going to intel" makes indians force you
> > to use something.
> Yeah, come on, let's start one new flaming thread here!

Relax. As determined in other thread marked OT with same subject, there is no fuel to feed to the flames ;)


Parag

reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[arjun kumar]

On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 shevek@bur.st wrote:


>>> As far as I'm concerned, commercial trolls have successfully taken away
>>> linux's only ever chance to sweep the field.
>>>
>>> It is now gone. OSX rocks harder than linux, the spotlight
function is superb.
>>>

> [SNIPPED....]

> Sorry to feed the trolls, but I couldn't resist. Isn't OSX just
> a commercial re-hash of BSD that Jobs "appropriated"?  The performance
> has been so poor with the PPC platform that Apple has been forced
> to sign a pack with the devil and use ix86 in their future boxes.

> I'm not making this up! It would have been nice to have a competing
> platform remaining to keep everybody honest. Now that Apple is
> going Intel, we will be forced to use whatever the Indians provide.

Hey dick can you be a bit clear with this please. 
I don't understand how "apple going to intel" makes indians force you
to use something.

> Cheers,
> Dick Johnson
> Penguin : Linux version 2.6.12 on an i686 machine (5537.79 BogoMips).
>  Notice : All mail here is now cached for review by Dictator Bush.
>                   98.36% of all statistics are fiction.

Cheers,
Arjun

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Artem B. Bityuckiy]

arjun kumar wrote:
> Hey dick can you be a bit clear with this please. 
> I don't understand how "apple going to intel" makes indians force you
> to use something.
Yeah, come on, let's start one new flaming thread here!


-- 
Best Regards,
Artem B. Bityuckiy,
St.-Petersburg, Russia.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Schneelocke]

On 01/07/05, Artem B. Bityuckiy <dedekind@yandex.ru> wrote:
> > Hey dick can you be a bit clear with this please.
> > I don't understand how "apple going to intel" makes indians force you
> > to use something.
>
> Yeah, come on, let's start one new flaming thread here!

Actually, the person he replied to really is called Dick - it was
Richard Johnson. So I doubt it was meant as an insult; rather, he just
failed to capitalise the name (which, admittedly, is a bit
unfortunate).

-- 
schnee

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[arjun kumar]

On 7/1/05, Schneelocke <schneelocke@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 01/07/05, Artem B. Bityuckiy <dedekind@yandex.ru> wrote:
> > > Hey dick can you be a bit clear with this please.
> > > I don't understand how "apple going to intel" makes indians force you
> > > to use something.
> >
> > Yeah, come on, let's start one new flaming thread here!
> 
> Actually, the person he replied to really is called Dick - it was
> Richard Johnson. So I doubt it was meant as an insult; rather, he just
> failed to capitalise the name (which, admittedly, is a bit
> unfortunate).
> 
Hey guys i no ways was that an insult, i just saw his signature and it
said dick.
 Sorry if that offends anybody.

And yeah i am still waiting for the answer :)

Cheers,
Arjun.

> --
> schnee
>

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Markus Törnqvist]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2149 bytes --]

Christopher Warner wrote:

>Sweeping change is nice, incremental change is much more sweeter. The

Incremental change which should nonetheless lead to something much
more than what we have now, as sweetly as possible.

>problem is that the "filesystem" in and of itself is where data is kept.
>In most cases people who run commercial businesses aren't going to
>change their filesystem type unless their is a clear advantage.

And no one's asking them to.

>Therefore, you're argument negates real world. Your argument should be
>more about structure and a seamless migration path.

Yeah, boot the new kernel and it's there ;)
Oh and upgrade the userland tools if you want to use the extensions,
but certainly it has to be backward-compatible as well.

In this case people won't have to mkfs their enterprise servers.

>The argument isn't about technical merit.

No, it's about where Linux is going and where some people feel
it should go, and about discussing if it's a good idea to do
something a little different than everyone else, or most of
them, to get the best system out there shipped out.

Which I think is a no-brainer, who doesn't want Linux to be best ;)

The Mac/MS situation is of course a real threat, but Linux
does have the potential to be so much more.

Oh, and it's not just the VFS. What if someone gets a killer
idea for some other minor revolution inside the code that's
difficult to implement and may be un-unixy and more plan9y?

The argument is, therefore, mostly politics.

And on how to accomplish this:

The clearest idea is to fork off 2.7, or whatever, and extend
the VFS, and whatever, there and make sure it works before 2.8 is out.
Or figure out how to do this with -mm.

It just has to be very difficult with -mm, whose apparent intention
is to serve as proving ground for backportable patches, not
really major overhauls.

Socially a new, official dev tree would draw the most attention, 
a lot more than an obscure semi- or un-official dev tree.

Furthermore, having a change this size pop up as 2.6.25 from
an -mm backport seems a bit off...

-- 
mjt


[-- Attachment #2: Digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 189 bytes --]

reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[shevek]

As far as I'm concerned, commercial trolls have successfully taken away
linux's only ever chance to sweep the field.

It is now gone. OSX rocks harder than linux, the spotlight function is superb.

That plus this squabbling is buying m$ enough time to make their version.

I label according to the observed effect. I haven't read the code.

Linux coulda had the OSX-type spotlight thing working, plus twice as fast
filesystem 6 months or a year before Apple ... and a couple of years before m$.

Someone shoulda simply forked it then. When Hans first said 'replace VFS with
reiser4'. I doubt he could have done it by himself ... they (trolls) would
simply isolate his work and write his efforts off as the typical actions of a
lone looney ... as they already characterise him.

The achievement reiser4 represents cannot be overstated. Genuine linux
developers would have bent over backwards to get this as the primary filesystem
for linux. Noone has ever doubled filesystem performance before, as far as I
know, except the BeOS development team who have been divided as spoils of war
between the two major competitors Apple and M$.

And he did so in a way that (a) provides for simple expansion in arbitrary
directions without hackish horror such as AVFS presents; and (b) enables
provision of compatibility with any arbitrary filesystem featureset.

What is all the complaining about?

And who are these guys?

Reiser has chased around trying to respond to all your criticisms for how long
now? A year? Many of the critics I recall hadn't even read the material on his
web site. Are these the same people now further delaying linux's adoption of
21st century filesystem semantics?

So many of the arguments I read are circular.

eg

* reiser4 can't be included until it has had widespread testing.

* reiser4 shouldn't contain two levels of plugins, since plugins properly belong
in the awful hackish AVFS layer, above the VFS layer.

In fact the main impediment to reiser4 having been widely tested, in my
ill-educated opinion, is simply that the directories look like files. This
means a lot of application code needs minor tweaks, or at least thorough
testing. Yet, it should be trivial to fix reiser4 so that directories don't
look like files, no? using plugins?

Some arguments against reiser4 show that the arguer in question is even less
well educated than even myself. ie, the person has not even tried reiser4.

Anyone who has, finds themselves so blown away by the apparent doubling of speed
of any disk-bound task, that they start to question how much effort must have
gone into making previous filesystems so slow. Who ever thought putting a
transaction log at the end of the disk furthest away from where the data needs
to be written would be a good thing? Why should it not go just near to where
the head happens to be already? Thankyou Hans for showing us how.

To argue that benchmarks do not truly reflect real world use, you must never
have even taken the time to real world use this thing. While Herr Reiser has
put years of his life, and now apparently also much of his money, into creating
it for you.

Try and get a wider scope on life, people. What is better for the future? Slow,
dawdling development on slow dawdling filesystems and their supporting
architecture, when we have been shown a fully functioning, effective and I am
led to believe, simple replacement?

Well, like I said at the start, it's too late, if you do not like that path. We
are now trapped there. The masses of users who would have been attracted by
linux beating Apple and M$ to the punch, are now fading into some potential
parallel universe. It's not this one. Hang your heads in shame, and cry. We
lost. We are back to the same commercial monopoly-dominated market that we ever
had. The loser is all of us, the common good, which has been sacrificed for the
good of the few, by the invisible hand of the market, and the collective
unconsciousness.

Simeon

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Christopher Warner]

Sweeping change is nice, incremental change is much more sweeter. The
problem is that the "filesystem" in and of itself is where data is kept.
In most cases people who run commercial businesses aren't going to
change their filesystem type unless their is a clear advantage.

Therefore, you're argument negates real world. Your argument should be
more about structure and a seamless migration path.

The argument isn't about technical merit.

-- 
.-Christopher Warner---------------------------------------------.
| my email is recycled to be sure; bcc my personal email address |
`----------------------------------------------------------------'

On Thu, 2005-06-30 at 22:26 +1000, shevek@bur.st wrote:
> As far as I'm concerned, commercial trolls have successfully taken away
> linux's only ever chance to sweep the field.
> 
> It is now gone. OSX rocks harder than linux, the spotlight function is superb.
> 
> That plus this squabbling is buying m$ enough time to make their version.
> 
> I label according to the observed effect. I haven't read the code.
> 
> Linux coulda had the OSX-type spotlight thing working, plus twice as fast
> filesystem 6 months or a year before Apple ... and a couple of years before m$.
> 
> Someone shoulda simply forked it then. When Hans first said 'replace VFS with
> reiser4'. I doubt he could have done it by himself ... they (trolls) would
> simply isolate his work and write his efforts off as the typical actions of a
> lone looney ... as they already characterise him.
> 
> The achievement reiser4 represents cannot be overstated. Genuine linux
> developers would have bent over backwards to get this as the primary filesystem
> for linux. Noone has ever doubled filesystem performance before, as far as I
> know, except the BeOS development team who have been divided as spoils of war
> between the two major competitors Apple and M$.
> 
> And he did so in a way that (a) provides for simple expansion in arbitrary
> directions without hackish horror such as AVFS presents; and (b) enables
> provision of compatibility with any arbitrary filesystem featureset.
> 
> What is all the complaining about?
> 
> And who are these guys?
> 
> Reiser has chased around trying to respond to all your criticisms for how long
> now? A year? Many of the critics I recall hadn't even read the material on his
> web site. Are these the same people now further delaying linux's adoption of
> 21st century filesystem semantics?
> 
> So many of the arguments I read are circular.
> 
> eg
> 
> * reiser4 can't be included until it has had widespread testing.
> 
> * reiser4 shouldn't contain two levels of plugins, since plugins properly belong
> in the awful hackish AVFS layer, above the VFS layer.
> 
> In fact the main impediment to reiser4 having been widely tested, in my
> ill-educated opinion, is simply that the directories look like files. This
> means a lot of application code needs minor tweaks, or at least thorough
> testing. Yet, it should be trivial to fix reiser4 so that directories don't
> look like files, no? using plugins?
> 
> Some arguments against reiser4 show that the arguer in question is even less
> well educated than even myself. ie, the person has not even tried reiser4.
> 
> Anyone who has, finds themselves so blown away by the apparent doubling of speed
> of any disk-bound task, that they start to question how much effort must have
> gone into making previous filesystems so slow. Who ever thought putting a
> transaction log at the end of the disk furthest away from where the data needs
> to be written would be a good thing? Why should it not go just near to where
> the head happens to be already? Thankyou Hans for showing us how.
> 
> To argue that benchmarks do not truly reflect real world use, you must never
> have even taken the time to real world use this thing. While Herr Reiser has
> put years of his life, and now apparently also much of his money, into creating
> it for you.
> 
> Try and get a wider scope on life, people. What is better for the future? Slow,
> dawdling development on slow dawdling filesystems and their supporting
> architecture, when we have been shown a fully functioning, effective and I am
> led to believe, simple replacement?
> 
> Well, like I said at the start, it's too late, if you do not like that path. We
> are now trapped there. The masses of users who would have been attracted by
> linux beating Apple and M$ to the punch, are now fading into some potential
> parallel universe. It's not this one. Hang your heads in shame, and cry. We
> lost. We are back to the same commercial monopoly-dominated market that we ever
> had. The loser is all of us, the common good, which has been sacrificed for the
> good of the few, by the invisible hand of the market, and the collective
> unconsciousness.
> 
> Simeon
> 
> 
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Rik Van Riel]

On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 shevek@bur.st wrote:

> Reiser has chased around trying to respond to all your criticisms for 
> how long now? A year?

The real test is in how comments are answered.  Did comments
on reiserfs 4 get answered by changing the code to make it
more suitable for integration into Linux, or did the comments
get answered only with words ?

When you're discussing code, often the best answer to
criticism is a patch - not a dissertation.

-- 
The Theory of Escalating Commitment: "The cost of continuing mistakes is
borne by others, while the cost of admitting mistakes is borne by yourself."
  -- Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in Economics

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 shevek@bur.st wrote:

> As far as I'm concerned, commercial trolls have successfully taken away
> linux's only ever chance to sweep the field.
>
> It is now gone. OSX rocks harder than linux, the spotlight function is superb.
>
[SNIPPED....]

Sorry to feed the trolls, but I couldn't resist. Isn't OSX just
a commercial re-hash of BSD that Jobs "appropriated"?  The performance
has been so poor with the PPC platform that Apple has been forced
to sign a pack with the devil and use ix86 in their future boxes.

I'm not making this up! It would have been nice to have a competing
platform remaining to keep everybody honest. Now that Apple is
going Intel, we will be forced to use whatever the Indians provide.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.6.12 on an i686 machine (5537.79 BogoMips).
  Notice : All mail here is now cached for review by Dictator Bush.
                  98.36% of all statistics are fiction.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Bill Davidsen]

Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 shevek@bur.st wrote:
> 
>> As far as I'm concerned, commercial trolls have successfully taken away
>> linux's only ever chance to sweep the field.
>>
>> It is now gone. OSX rocks harder than linux, the spotlight function is 
>> superb.
>>
> [SNIPPED....]
> 
> Sorry to feed the trolls, but I couldn't resist. Isn't OSX just
> a commercial re-hash of BSD that Jobs "appropriated"?  The performance
> has been so poor with the PPC platform that Apple has been forced
> to sign a pack with the devil and use ix86 in their future boxes.

s/pack/pact/

It's not at all clear that Apple had a choice, please read 
comp.sys.intel for a long discussion I won't repeat.
> 
> I'm not making this up! It would have been nice to have a competing
> platform remaining to keep everybody honest. Now that Apple is
> going Intel, we will be forced to use whatever the Indians provide.

Or download OSX and run it elsewhere, or...
-- 
    -bill davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
  last possible moment - but no longer"  -me

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[James Courtier-Dutton]

Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> 
> Sorry to feed the trolls, but I couldn't resist. Isn't OSX just
> a commercial re-hash of BSD that Jobs "appropriated"?  The performance
> has been so poor with the PPC platform that Apple has been forced
> to sign a pack with the devil and use ix86 in their future boxes.
> 

Actually, OSX is more like that old and superb NEXTSTEP.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Jim Crilly]

On 06/30/05 10:26:12PM +1000, shevek@bur.st wrote:
> As far as I'm concerned, commercial trolls have successfully taken away
> linux's only ever chance to sweep the field.

And you are?

> 
> It is now gone. OSX rocks harder than linux, the spotlight function is superb.
> 
> That plus this squabbling is buying m$ enough time to make their version.
>

MS has been working on and delaying WinFS for years, arguing with Hans for
a few months will have no affect on MS' release schedule.

> 
> I label according to the observed effect. I haven't read the code.
> 

Of course not, it's not like the code actually matters, right?

> Linux coulda had the OSX-type spotlight thing working, plus twice as fast
> filesystem 6 months or a year before Apple ... and a couple of years before m$.
> 

So? Most of the complaints about Linux on the desktop are userland
problems. Adding cool features to the kernel won't make a big difference,
if for no other reason than it will take a long time for support to make it
into things like Gnome and KDE. And that's if they choose to support them,
they have to support other OSes as well and adding support for features
that are Linux-specific isn't to be taken lightly, especially since these
would be less than Linux-specific, they would be tied to a single
filesystem on Linux.

> Someone shoulda simply forked it then. When Hans first said 'replace VFS with
> reiser4'. I doubt he could have done it by himself ... they (trolls) would
> simply isolate his work and write his efforts off as the typical actions of a
> lone looney ... as they already characterise him.
> 

He can still do that, nothing is stopping him from forking Reisux and
trying to woo developers.

> The achievement reiser4 represents cannot be overstated. Genuine linux
> developers would have bent over backwards to get this as the primary filesystem
> for linux. Noone has ever doubled filesystem performance before, as far as I
> know, except the BeOS development team who have been divided as spoils of war
> between the two major competitors Apple and M$.
> 
> And he did so in a way that (a) provides for simple expansion in arbitrary
> directions without hackish horror such as AVFS presents; and (b) enables
> provision of compatibility with any arbitrary filesystem featureset.
> 
> What is all the complaining about?
> 
> And who are these guys?
> 
> Reiser has chased around trying to respond to all your criticisms for how long
> now? A year? Many of the critics I recall hadn't even read the material on his
> web site. Are these the same people now further delaying linux's adoption of
> 21st century filesystem semantics?
> 

Probably because most of the material on his website reads like a
commercial. It's hard to read through documentation when it feels like
someone's constantly trying to sell you something.

> So many of the arguments I read are circular.
> 
> eg
> 
> * reiser4 can't be included until it has had widespread testing.
> 
> * reiser4 shouldn't contain two levels of plugins, since plugins properly belong
> in the awful hackish AVFS layer, above the VFS layer.
> 
> In fact the main impediment to reiser4 having been widely tested, in my
> ill-educated opinion, is simply that the directories look like files. This
> means a lot of application code needs minor tweaks, or at least thorough
> testing. Yet, it should be trivial to fix reiser4 so that directories don't
> look like files, no? using plugins?
> 
> Some arguments against reiser4 show that the arguer in question is even less
> well educated than even myself. ie, the person has not even tried reiser4.
> 
> Anyone who has, finds themselves so blown away by the apparent doubling of speed
> of any disk-bound task, that they start to question how much effort must have
> gone into making previous filesystems so slow. Who ever thought putting a
> transaction log at the end of the disk furthest away from where the data needs
> to be written would be a good thing? Why should it not go just near to where
> the head happens to be already? Thankyou Hans for showing us how.
> 
> To argue that benchmarks do not truly reflect real world use, you must never
> have even taken the time to real world use this thing. While Herr Reiser has
> put years of his life, and now apparently also much of his money, into creating
> it for you.
> 
> Try and get a wider scope on life, people. What is better for the future? Slow,
> dawdling development on slow dawdling filesystems and their supporting
> architecture, when we have been shown a fully functioning, effective and I am
> led to believe, simple replacement?
> 

And what is better for Linux? It's all about perspective and the people on
this mailing list have to maintain the kernel from a developer's standpoint
and if they start accepting every new feature regardless of complexity,
maintainability, etc the kernel will become a nightmare. 

And what happens in 2 years when Hans posts about reiser5 fixing all of the
bad things about reiser4 and that reiser5 should be merged ASAP so that
everyone can upgrade again?

> Well, like I said at the start, it's too late, if you do not like that path. We
> are now trapped there. The masses of users who would have been attracted by
> linux beating Apple and M$ to the punch, are now fading into some potential
> parallel universe. It's not this one. Hang your heads in shame, and cry. We
> lost. We are back to the same commercial monopoly-dominated market that we ever
> had. The loser is all of us, the common good, which has been sacrificed for the
> good of the few, by the invisible hand of the market, and the collective
> unconsciousness.
> 

And you're asking the kernel devs to get a wider scope on life? It sounds
like you're not even living in the same reality that I am.

> Simeon
> 

Jim.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Markus Törnqvist]

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On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 11:33:26AM -0400, Jim Crilly wrote:

>> I label according to the observed effect. I haven't read the code.
>Of course not, it's not like the code actually matters, right?

As for Reiser4, they're fixing the code now to look more Linuxy
and all's well.

The discussion is "Should the VFS be extended to support files-as-dirs
or data objects by using what we already have in Reiser4 in -mm, although
disabled."

>So? Most of the complaints about Linux on the desktop are userland
>problems. Adding cool features to the kernel won't make a big difference,
>if for no other reason than it will take a long time for support to make it
>into things like Gnome and KDE. And that's if they choose to support them,

And people who'd like to use something lighter than Gnome or KDE
and still use these nice features?

>they have to support other OSes as well and adding support for features
>that are Linux-specific isn't to be taken lightly, especially since these
>would be less than Linux-specific, they would be tied to a single
>filesystem on Linux.

They would not be tied to a single filesystem, naturally, I think
we can all agree that case is closed, as it'll just spawn another
waste-of-time flamewar.

>> Someone shoulda simply forked it then. When Hans first said 'replace VFS with
>> reiser4'. I doubt he could have done it by himself ... they (trolls) would
[...]
>He can still do that, nothing is stopping him from forking Reisux and
>trying to woo developers.

It'd be much better to talk this thing through..
There have been pretty good arguments for the extended VFS, that it
would be doable. It may just be less of a unix after that, or less
of Linux as we know it now.

The circular reasoning "We don't want Reiser4's files-as-dirs in
before they're tested. We also have them disabled by default.
They should not be implemented on this layer here, but we won't
let you touch our VFS." is bad.

Surely if the things started to go into the VFS in a separate,
official tree, it'd no longer be just Namesys doing the work.

>And what is better for Linux? It's all about perspective and the people on
>this mailing list have to maintain the kernel from a developer's standpoint
>and if they start accepting every new feature regardless of complexity,
>maintainability, etc the kernel will become a nightmare. 

The filesystem is tested well enough to go in. For real.
It may not be production stable with immediacy but it is tested.

The extended semantics are a separate matter.

>And what happens in 2 years when Hans posts about reiser5 fixing all of the
>bad things about reiser4 and that reiser5 should be merged ASAP so that
>everyone can upgrade again?

Then someone steps up and goes "No, shut the fuck up and fix the code,
we gave you your shot" or something.

Community pressure.

And it'll be a lot easier with the new VFS.

>And you're asking the kernel devs to get a wider scope on life? It sounds
>like you're not even living in the same reality that I am.

Sometimes it also seems people would much rather shout at each
other than see that reasons are starting to pop up why Linux
could lose popularity.

I accidentally deleted the paragraph with you saying the page
reads like a commercial.

I half agree, Hans has written that well, but maybe for
people who would pay him money to do his work.
Therefore some of the stuff is a bit obscure. Like what is now 
Reiser4.1 (ie. ..metas/ whatever, I believe) is apparently referred 
to as Reiser6 there.

It'd be damned nice to see that page revisited a bit, maybe not much,
but getting the names straight and having one of the tech guys write
tech documentation that's clearly accessible.

That page does still not change the situation that the code exists
to some extent, which could be merged to the VFS layer by
extending it a bit and this would be easiest done in a tree that
people will want to hack on.

And frankly this amount of tautology is starting to get even 
on my nerves :)

-- 
mjt


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Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Jim Crilly]

On 06/30/05 07:02:44PM +0300, Markus   Törnqvist wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 11:33:26AM -0400, Jim Crilly wrote:
> 
> >> I label according to the observed effect. I haven't read the code.
> >Of course not, it's not like the code actually matters, right?
> 
> As for Reiser4, they're fixing the code now to look more Linuxy
> and all's well.
> 
> The discussion is "Should the VFS be extended to support files-as-dirs
> or data objects by using what we already have in Reiser4 in -mm, although
> disabled."
> 
> >So? Most of the complaints about Linux on the desktop are userland
> >problems. Adding cool features to the kernel won't make a big difference,
> >if for no other reason than it will take a long time for support to make it
> >into things like Gnome and KDE. And that's if they choose to support them,
> 
> And people who'd like to use something lighter than Gnome or KDE
> and still use these nice features?
>

Then work with whatever WM you want to help them support what makes sense
for them. For instance, I use Enlightenment but most of the crap proposed
in Reiser4 doesn't make sense for E because there's no filemanager or
anything. The image thumbnails in metadata might be nice, but I wouldn't
throw a fit if the current runtime generated thumbnails were still used.

> 
> >they have to support other OSes as well and adding support for features
> >that are Linux-specific isn't to be taken lightly, especially since these
> >would be less than Linux-specific, they would be tied to a single
> >filesystem on Linux.
> 
> They would not be tied to a single filesystem, naturally, I think
> we can all agree that case is closed, as it'll just spawn another
> waste-of-time flamewar.
> 

Nothing has happened so far, once the VFS extensions are laid out,
documented and implemented we can begin to start saying that some of the
features are fs agnostic.

> >> Someone shoulda simply forked it then. When Hans first said 'replace VFS with
> >> reiser4'. I doubt he could have done it by himself ... they (trolls) would
> [...]
> >He can still do that, nothing is stopping him from forking Reisux and
> >trying to woo developers.
> 
> It'd be much better to talk this thing through..
> There have been pretty good arguments for the extended VFS, that it
> would be doable. It may just be less of a unix after that, or less
> of Linux as we know it now.
> 

I'm not advocating a fork, I just think it's stupid that so many people
have been saying "Stop arguing, just accept reiser4 as-is because it's
fast and cool!!!!"

> The circular reasoning "We don't want Reiser4's files-as-dirs in
> before they're tested. We also have them disabled by default.
> They should not be implemented on this layer here, but we won't
> let you touch our VFS." is bad.
> 
> Surely if the things started to go into the VFS in a separate,
> official tree, it'd no longer be just Namesys doing the work.
> 
> >And what is better for Linux? It's all about perspective and the people on
> >this mailing list have to maintain the kernel from a developer's standpoint
> >and if they start accepting every new feature regardless of complexity,
> >maintainability, etc the kernel will become a nightmare. 
> 
> The filesystem is tested well enough to go in. For real.
> It may not be production stable with immediacy but it is tested.
> 

People have been saying the same thing about reiser3 for years and yet
every time I break down and try it again for whatever reason I find a nice
new corner case that causes me headaches and usually ends up in me going
back to ext3 or XFS.

> The extended semantics are a separate matter.
> 
> >And what happens in 2 years when Hans posts about reiser5 fixing all of the
> >bad things about reiser4 and that reiser5 should be merged ASAP so that
> >everyone can upgrade again?
> 
> Then someone steps up and goes "No, shut the fuck up and fix the code,
> we gave you your shot" or something.
> 
> Community pressure.
> 

Right, because Hans is so damned receptive.

>
> And it'll be a lot easier with the new VFS.
>

I'm not buying it, but only time will tell.


> >And you're asking the kernel devs to get a wider scope on life? It sounds
> >like you're not even living in the same reality that I am.
> 
> Sometimes it also seems people would much rather shout at each
> other than see that reasons are starting to pop up why Linux
> could lose popularity.
> 

I don't disagree, there are many aspects of each section of a Linux distro
where decisions can affect how Linux is perceived by current and new users.
But IMO not letting reiser4 in, in it's current state, isn't going to send
a bunch of Linux users running to get Macs.

> I accidentally deleted the paragraph with you saying the page
> reads like a commercial.
> 
> I half agree, Hans has written that well, but maybe for
> people who would pay him money to do his work.
> Therefore some of the stuff is a bit obscure. Like what is now 
> Reiser4.1 (ie. ..metas/ whatever, I believe) is apparently referred 
> to as Reiser6 there.
> 

I understand why he wants to have his marketing pages and I don't care if
they exist, but you would think he would also want to have some SDK-type
pages where it explains the new features, the "plug-in" API and such.


> It'd be damned nice to see that page revisited a bit, maybe not much,
> but getting the names straight and having one of the tech guys write
> tech documentation that's clearly accessible.
> 
> That page does still not change the situation that the code exists
> to some extent, which could be merged to the VFS layer by
> extending it a bit and this would be easiest done in a tree that
> people will want to hack on.
> 

But if big VFS changes are going to happen, I doubt anyone would want to
make them in -linus or -mm because there's probably going to be a lot of
initial breakage. Maybe this would be a good reason to fork 2.7?

> And frankly this amount of tautology is starting to get even 
> on my nerves :)
> 

I agree, it was interesting for the first few days but now most of the
threads have gone so far OT that it's just stupid.

> -- 
> mjt
> 

Jim.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Ed Cogburn]

Jim Crilly wrote:

> On 06/30/05 07:02:44PM +0300, Markus   Törnqvist wrote:
>> It'd be much better to talk this thing through..
>> There have been pretty good arguments for the extended VFS, that it
>> would be doable. It may just be less of a unix after that, or less
>> of Linux as we know it now.
>> 
> 
> I'm not advocating a fork, I just think it's stupid that so many people
> have been saying "Stop arguing, just accept reiser4 as-is because it's
> fast and cool!!!!"


Assuming "fast and cool" here equates to some level of improvement to the
existing kernel, and/or new features/capabilities not currently available,
then are you saying "fast and cool" isn't good enough anymore, you now have
to be politically correct and socially popular and a master brown-noser as
well to get code into the kernel even just on an *experimental* basis?

In reality, the implied attitude behind your statement actually *guarantees*
a fork of Linux at some point down the road if you keep stonewalling the
inclusion of something that clearly has enormous potential, because for
many people "fast and cool" IS THE DESIRED OBJECTIVE, and by saying no to
that, YOU are the one setting the stage for a fork.  R4, or any other
promising and relatively stable technology, can't reach its full potential
until it begins to see wider testing and usage, which can only happen when
it gets included into the mainstream stable kernel.  So when the fork
finally happens because people got tired of waiting, don't blame the
forkers and don't blame Hans, it will have been your own attitude that made
it a fait accompli.

You obviously don't realize it, but a lot of us don't give a damn whether
you like Hans or not, or whether you think his design is "clean" or
"correct" or not, we just want Linux to be the "fastest and coolest" it can
be.  Find a way to solve the technical problems, and just give R4 its shot. 
Let it succeed or fail based on its own merits, and not because its author
may have poor social skills, or simply rubs you the wrong way.

I hope your attitude turns out to be in the minority, and cooler heads
prevail in this argument, because otherwise, Unix historians will likely
look back to this moment and say this was when Linux began to stumble...

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Sat, Jul 02, 2005 at 09:05:41AM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> Assuming "fast and cool" here equates to some level of improvement to the
> existing kernel, and/or new features/capabilities not currently available,
> then are you saying "fast and cool" isn't good enough anymore, you now have
> to be politically correct and socially popular and a master brown-noser as
> well to get code into the kernel even just on an *experimental* basis?
> 
> In reality, the implied attitude behind your statement actually *guarantees*
> a fork of Linux at some point down the road if you keep stonewalling the
> inclusion of something that clearly has enormous potential, because for
> many people "fast and cool" IS THE DESIRED OBJECTIVE, and by saying no to
> that, YOU are the one setting the stage for a fork.

In fact such a fork would be a great thing.  Let people play fast and loose
who want to do that, and if they don't manage to break it and the feature
is still cool a while later we clean it up and merge it into Linux proper.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Ed Cogburn]

Christoph Hellwig wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 02, 2005 at 09:05:41AM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
>> Assuming "fast and cool" here equates to some level of improvement to the
>> existing kernel, and/or new features/capabilities not currently
>> available, then are you saying "fast and cool" isn't good enough anymore,
>> you now have to be politically correct and socially popular and a master
>> brown-noser as well to get code into the kernel even just on an
>> *experimental* basis?
>> 
>> In reality, the implied attitude behind your statement actually
>> *guarantees* a fork of Linux at some point down the road if you keep
>> stonewalling the inclusion of something that clearly has enormous
>> potential, because for many people "fast and cool" IS THE DESIRED
>> OBJECTIVE, and by saying no to that, YOU are the one setting the stage
>> for a fork.
> 
> In fact such a fork would be a great thing.  Let people play fast and
> loose who want to do that,


Here's the irony of your statement:  -mm is too unstable for many people to
even try out R4 with, breaking or freezing or having other problems long
before they even get to R4 itself.

Please remember that the comment was "fast and cool", not "fast and
unstable".

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Jim Crilly]

On 07/02/05 09:05:41AM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> Jim Crilly wrote:
> 
> > On 06/30/05 07:02:44PM +0300, Markus   Törnqvist wrote:
> >> It'd be much better to talk this thing through..
> >> There have been pretty good arguments for the extended VFS, that it
> >> would be doable. It may just be less of a unix after that, or less
> >> of Linux as we know it now.
> >> 
> > 
> > I'm not advocating a fork, I just think it's stupid that so many people
> > have been saying "Stop arguing, just accept reiser4 as-is because it's
> > fast and cool!!!!"
> 
> 
> Assuming "fast and cool" here equates to some level of improvement to the
> existing kernel, and/or new features/capabilities not currently available,
> then are you saying "fast and cool" isn't good enough anymore, you now have
> to be politically correct and socially popular and a master brown-noser as
> well to get code into the kernel even just on an *experimental* basis?
> 

Fast and cool by themselves shouldn't be good enough, infact fast could
definately be optional because if the implementation is good and the code
is clean it will get optimized down the road. And IMO reiser4 is an
exception to the "but just mark it experimental" argument because it's so
large and implements so many things that should be in other places. If it
was something small like a device driver that was in 1-5 files and didn't
touch anything else, I'm sure no one would argue against it's inclusion.

> In reality, the implied attitude behind your statement actually *guarantees*
> a fork of Linux at some point down the road if you keep stonewalling the
> inclusion of something that clearly has enormous potential, because for
> many people "fast and cool" IS THE DESIRED OBJECTIVE, and by saying no to
> that, YOU are the one setting the stage for a fork.  R4, or any other
> promising and relatively stable technology, can't reach its full potential
> until it begins to see wider testing and usage, which can only happen when
> it gets included into the mainstream stable kernel.  So when the fork
> finally happens because people got tired of waiting, don't blame the
> forkers and don't blame Hans, it will have been your own attitude that made
> it a fait accompli.
> 
> You obviously don't realize it, but a lot of us don't give a damn whether
> you like Hans or not, or whether you think his design is "clean" or
> "correct" or not, we just want Linux to be the "fastest and coolest" it can
> be.  Find a way to solve the technical problems, and just give R4 its shot. 
> Let it succeed or fail based on its own merits, and not because its author
> may have poor social skills, or simply rubs you the wrong way.
> 

Obviously you don't care about the code or it's maintainer's attitude, you
don't have to deal with either of them. And if you had read all of the
reiser4 threads you would have seen that people are trying to work out the
technical details, it's not a fast process when 2 things this large and
complicated are involved.

> I hope your attitude turns out to be in the minority, and cooler heads
> prevail in this argument, because otherwise, Unix historians will likely
> look back to this moment and say this was when Linux began to stumble...
> 

I'm glad the kernel maintaners are being convservative about what gets
merged, if they allowed everything in that was sent to lkml the historians
would be looking back and saying this was when Linux started to become
unmaintainable.

Jim.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Ed Cogburn]

Jim Crilly wrote:

> On 07/02/05 09:05:41AM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
>> Jim Crilly wrote:
>> 
>> Assuming "fast and cool" here equates to some level of improvement to the
>> existing kernel, and/or new features/capabilities not currently
>> available, then are you saying "fast and cool" isn't good enough anymore,
>> you now have to be politically correct and socially popular and a master
>> brown-noser as well to get code into the kernel even just on an
>> *experimental* basis?
> 
> Fast and cool by themselves shouldn't be good enough, infact fast could
> definately be optional


And please point out where anyone has said ANYWHERE that R4 is going to be
FORCED on people!  Stop accusing Hans of refusing to answer relevent points
when you're doing the same damn thing.


> Obviously you don't care about the code


Bullshit.  If the code doesn't work or is unstable or unmaintained then
everyone is concerned.  BUT THOSE ARE NOT THE ISSUES HERE.  Maybe Hans will
be a little more sociable towards you when you guys start being a little
more sociable towards him, or maybe he's just a jerk and will never change,
I don't know, and frankly I don't care, but R4 deserves its shot anyway
based just on its potential alone.  Its reached the point where it can only
get better with more *exposure*, and as I said in my response to Christoph,
-mm is not the place to get exposure from a wider audience, due to its
instability, even Andrew has said his -mm tree isn't meant to be a "stable"
kernel series.

In the meantime, if a fork does happen, I'm going with the one that gives
good ideas their chance at the mainstream no matter who the author is.  If
you guys really want to kill the Linux success story, just keep right on
putting your ego and personal feelings in front of what's good for the
users and good for the success of Linux outside your elite club.  And
before you tell yourself that the users don't matter, you'd better ask
around among all the *other* developers here why *they* are working on
Linux now, and not a BSD, or another fork of Linux.  Hint: many are
employed by companies whose customer's are ... Linux *USERS*.  Linux's
initial success was not pre-ordained or guaranteed, it was accomplished
because a core group of people started WORKING TOGETHER with a common
vision, if you now decide to forget what got you to this point, I GUARANTEE
YOU that the success of your version of Linux will not continue.

I know there are technical issues, in a few places by a few people, like the
thread Andrew started, they are still being discussed, but when we reach
the point where people say "fast and cool" is not good or desirable
anymore, without realizing how absurd that sounds, then the dispute has
clearly gone beyond the technical, and into the realm of the ego
stratosphere.  Believe it or not Jim, but I'm absolutely sure Hans really
wants whats best for Linux in the long run just as you do.  R4 deserves its
chance, so find a way to make it work, and that goes to Hans too.

Thank you all for bearing through this rant...

Flame retardant attire now in place, you may fire at your convenience
gentlemen.  :)

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Jim Crilly]

On 07/03/05 07:30:57PM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> Jim Crilly wrote:
> 
> > On 07/02/05 09:05:41AM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> >> Jim Crilly wrote:
> >> 
> >> Assuming "fast and cool" here equates to some level of improvement to the
> >> existing kernel, and/or new features/capabilities not currently
> >> available, then are you saying "fast and cool" isn't good enough anymore,
> >> you now have to be politically correct and socially popular and a master
> >> brown-noser as well to get code into the kernel even just on an
> >> *experimental* basis?
> > 
> > Fast and cool by themselves shouldn't be good enough, infact fast could
> > definately be optional
> 
> 
> And please point out where anyone has said ANYWHERE that R4 is going to be
> FORCED on people!  Stop accusing Hans of refusing to answer relevent points
> when you're doing the same damn thing.
> 

>From a user's standpoint, no of course not. But once it's included in the
mainline it's forced upon the kernel maintainers and if parts of it are
used to extend the VFS it's forced upon even more of the kernel
maintainers.

And when have I ever accused Hans of anything?

> 
> > Obviously you don't care about the code
> 
> 
> Bullshit.  If the code doesn't work or is unstable or unmaintained then
> everyone is concerned.  BUT THOSE ARE NOT THE ISSUES HERE.  Maybe Hans will
> be a little more sociable towards you when you guys start being a little
> more sociable towards him, or maybe he's just a jerk and will never change,
> I don't know, and frankly I don't care, but R4 deserves its shot anyway
> based just on its potential alone.  Its reached the point where it can only
> get better with more *exposure*, and as I said in my response to Christoph,
> -mm is not the place to get exposure from a wider audience, due to its
> instability, even Andrew has said his -mm tree isn't meant to be a "stable"
> kernel series.
> 

Yes, they are the issues. But I believe most of the big problems have been
fixed (i.e. things like R4 containing it's own hashing library instead of
using what's already in the kernel) in the original thread. And from what I
remember of the R3 saga back right after the 2.4.0 release, this looks
extremely familiar so I really doubt Hans will be changing any time soon.

And I agree that -mm is too unstable for R4 to get serious testing there,
the few times I gave it a try I always had more than one problem that
forced me back to -linus with a few custom patches.

> In the meantime, if a fork does happen, I'm going with the one that gives
> good ideas their chance at the mainstream no matter who the author is.  If
> you guys really want to kill the Linux success story, just keep right on
> putting your ego and personal feelings in front of what's good for the
> users and good for the success of Linux outside your elite club.  And
> before you tell yourself that the users don't matter, you'd better ask
> around among all the *other* developers here why *they* are working on
> Linux now, and not a BSD, or another fork of Linux.  Hint: many are
> employed by companies whose customer's are ... Linux *USERS*.  Linux's
> initial success was not pre-ordained or guaranteed, it was accomplished
> because a core group of people started WORKING TOGETHER with a common
> vision, if you now decide to forget what got you to this point, I GUARANTEE
> YOU that the success of your version of Linux will not continue.
> 

I think you're putting too much of an idealogical spin on the history of
Linux. And I seem to remember a lot of people claiming that R3 was the
filesystem of the future back around it's release as well and as far as I
can tell there's only a few major distributions that support R3 at all. 

If R4 isn't included it won't kill anything and if anything these
discussions have already gotten people thinking about new things that can
be done at the VFS level, so I wouldn't be surprised if we see VFS plugins
to handle things like on the fly compression whether R4 is included or not.

> I know there are technical issues, in a few places by a few people, like the
> thread Andrew started, they are still being discussed, but when we reach
> the point where people say "fast and cool" is not good or desirable
> anymore, without realizing how absurd that sounds, then the dispute has
> clearly gone beyond the technical, and into the realm of the ego
> stratosphere.  Believe it or not Jim, but I'm absolutely sure Hans really
> wants whats best for Linux in the long run just as you do.  R4 deserves its
> chance, so find a way to make it work, and that goes to Hans too.
> 

I still believe that "fast and cool" alone isn't enough. If someone were to
offer to sell you car that looked extremely cool and was outrageously fast
to the tune of like 2000hp would you buy it without thinking or would you 
want to make sure it had other important features like anti-lock breaks, 
airbags and someone who understands the engine enough to fix it when
something gets broke?

> Thank you all for bearing through this rant...
> 
> Flame retardant attire now in place, you may fire at your convenience
> gentlemen.  :)

Jim.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Ed Cogburn]

Jim Crilly wrote:

> From a user's standpoint, no of course not. But once it's included in the
> mainline it's forced upon the kernel maintainers


No it isn't.  Its just like any other optional feature.  If it stays
unmaintained for too long it just gets removed from the kernel, this
happens all the time.  This is another one of those non-issues that isn't
relevent to this discussion but is being used to avoid the real issue.  Go
waste someone else's time, Jim.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Horst von Brand]

Ed Cogburn <edcogburn@hotpop.com> wrote:
> Jim Crilly wrote:

[...]

> > From a user's standpoint, no of course not. But once it's included in the
> > mainline it's forced upon the kernel maintainers

> No it isn't.  Its just like any other optional feature.  If it stays
> unmaintained for too long it just gets removed from the kernel, this
> happens all the time.

The work involved in getting it into the kernel, workin with it while it is
there, and then ripping it out when it becomes clear that it won't be
maintained anymore doesn't count.

>                        This is another one of those non-issues that isn't
> relevent to this discussion but is being used to avoid the real issue.

How to allocate resources /is/ the central issue in any software
development enterprise. That this is open source makes it somewhat
different, in that most resources are spent integrating stuff developed
ouside, and maintaining it later.

>                                                                        Go
> waste someone else's time, Jim.

Good advise.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                     Fono: +56 32 654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria              +56 32 654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile                Fax:  +56 32 797513

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[cutaway]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Horst von Brand" <vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl>
To: "Ed Cogburn" <edcogburn@hotpop.com>
Cc: <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 03, 2005 22:11
Subject: Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again


>
> The work involved in getting it into the kernel, workin with it while it
is
> there, and then ripping it out when it becomes clear that it won't be
> maintained anymore doesn't count.

In reality is it doesn't count.  Users don't care what level of pain is
involved in producing the products they use.

Development efforts and results for OS's are always just taken for granted.

BTDT - if you're very lucky, a (very) few non-programming users might notice
something nice and mention that they noticed a difference.  The majority are
still struggling to find the power switch ;->

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Ed Cogburn]

cutaway@bellsouth.net wrote:
>
> In reality is it doesn't count.  Users don't care what level of pain is
> involved in producing the products they use.
> 
> Development efforts and results for OS's are always just taken for
> granted.
> 
> BTDT - if you're very lucky, a (very) few non-programming users might
> notice something nice and mention that they noticed a difference.  The 
> majority are still struggling to find the power switch ;->


You no longer have to be a kernel dev to see that there is more to the
resistance to R4 than objective technical issues, anyone with an
understanding of English whose been reading the R4
debates-that-quickly-turn-into-flame-wars the last couple of years here can
see that.  For you guys to continue to suggest otherwise only makes you out
to be the fools, not the "lusers" (which you obviously define as anyone who
isn't a kernel dev).

So be my guest, ignore the message and attack the messenger, I didn't
respond to start yet another flamewar, nor did I really expect much
objectivity anyway, as that's been thrown out the window even in
discussions between developers, e.g. the R4 plugins thread.

If its a fork of the kernel that you really want, so be it.  When it
happens, and given the increasing divergence going on between the
commercial distros and the vanilla kernel, maybe it's already begun, I'll
use the one that isn't afraid of giving new ideas a chance.

Flame away, I'm done.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Ed Tomlinson]

On Friday 08 July 2005 18:59, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> cutaway@bellsouth.net wrote:
> >
> > In reality is it doesn't count.  Users don't care what level of pain is
> > involved in producing the products they use.
> > 
> > Development efforts and results for OS's are always just taken for
> > granted.
> > 
> > BTDT - if you're very lucky, a (very) few non-programming users might
> > notice something nice and mention that they noticed a difference.  The 
> > majority are still struggling to find the power switch ;->
> 
> 
> You no longer have to be a kernel dev to see that there is more to the
> resistance to R4 than objective technical issues, anyone with an
> understanding of English whose been reading the R4
> debates-that-quickly-turn-into-flame-wars the last couple of years here can
> see that.  For you guys to continue to suggest otherwise only makes you out
> to be the fools, not the "lusers" (which you obviously define as anyone who
> isn't a kernel dev).
> 
> So be my guest, ignore the message and attack the messenger, I didn't
> respond to start yet another flamewar, nor did I really expect much
> objectivity anyway, as that's been thrown out the window even in
> discussions between developers, e.g. the R4 plugins thread.
> 
> If its a fork of the kernel that you really want, so be it.  When it
> happens, and given the increasing divergence going on between the
> commercial distros and the vanilla kernel, maybe it's already begun, I'll
> use the one that isn't afraid of giving new ideas a chance.
> 
> Flame away, I'm done.

No Flame from me.  One thing to remember is that Hans and friends _have_ supported
R3 for years.  This is an undisputed fact.  Second third parties have be able to add much
function (like journaling) to R3 so the code must be sort of readable...  With R4 they have
created a new FS that is _fast_ and _can_ do things no other FS can - I also expect they have
written cleaner code...  Why are we fighting about adding this sort of function to the kernel?  
Yes it may not be the absolute best way to do things.  How many times has tcpip be rewritten 
for linux?  The answer is more than once.  Lets put R4 in, see how it works, generalize the ideas 
and if we have to rewrite and rethink part of it lets do so.  

Please do add R4 to the kernel!

Thanks,

Ed Tomlinson 

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[David Lang]

On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Ed Tomlinson wrote:

>
> No Flame from me.  One thing to remember is that Hans and friends _have_ supported
> R3 for years.  This is an undisputed fact.  Second third parties have be able to add much
> function (like journaling) to R3 so the code must be sort of readable...  With R4 they have
> created a new FS that is _fast_ and _can_ do things no other FS can - I also expect they have
> written cleaner code...  Why are we fighting about adding this sort of function to the kernel?
> Yes it may not be the absolute best way to do things.  How many times has tcpip be rewritten
> for linux?  The answer is more than once.  Lets put R4 in, see how it works, generalize the ideas
> and if we have to rewrite and rethink part of it lets do so.

remember that Hans is on record (over a year ago) arguing that R3 should 
not be fixed becouse R4 was replacing it.

This type of thing is one of the reasons that you see arguments that 
aren't 'purely code-related' becouse the kernel folks realize that _they_ 
will have to maintain the code over time, Hans and company will go on and 
develop R5 (R10, whatever) and consider R4 obsolete and stop maintaining 
it.

David Lang

-- 
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
  -- C.A.R. Hoare

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Ed Cogburn]

David Lang wrote:

> On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
> 
>>
>> No Flame from me.  One thing to remember is that Hans and friends _have_
>> supported
>> R3 for years.  This is an undisputed fact.  Second third parties have be
>> able to add much
>> function (like journaling) to R3 so the code must be sort of readable... 
>> With R4 they have created a new FS that is _fast_ and _can_ do things no
>> other FS can - I also expect they have
>> written cleaner code...  Why are we fighting about adding this sort of
>> function to the kernel?
>> Yes it may not be the absolute best way to do things.  How many times has
>> tcpip be rewritten
>> for linux?  The answer is more than once.  Lets put R4 in, see how it
>> works, generalize the ideas and if we have to rewrite and rethink part of
>> it lets do so.
> 
> remember that Hans is on record (over a year ago) arguing that R3 should
> not be fixed becouse R4 was replacing it.
> 
> This type of thing is one of the reasons that you see arguments that
> aren't 'purely code-related' becouse the kernel folks realize that _they_
> will have to maintain the code over time, Hans and company will go on and
> develop R5 (R10, whatever) and consider R4 obsolete and stop maintaining
> it.



Maybe its because Hans and Co., having only a finite amount of dev time,
would much prefer to spend that time on R4 rather than R3?  Maybe if we
were to let R4 into the kernel, it wouldn't be long after that R3 could be
retired because everyone has moved to R4?  Maybe if R4 had been allowed
into the mainstream kernel a year ago, this ENTIRE ARGUMENT would be moot?

Since when has there been a requirement for all new code to have a signed
support contract before it enters the kernel?  Don't tell me this is
normal, because I damn well know its not.  Early on and for the most part
even today, good stuff gets into the kernel without any explicit or at
least meaningful promises of long term support.  That stuff stays in the
kernel as long as there is someone willing to maintain it, and it
disappears from the kernel when there is no one left willing to keep it
up-to-date.  That has always been the basic rule, without it Linux would
never have gone beyond the stage of being Linus's toy, because if Linus had
demanded such a support commitment up front, people would have lost
interest in hacking on his toy.

Devs should be free to work on whatever they want, because most of them are
doing this on their own time anyway, otherwise they might just decide to
hack on some other OS, or a fork of Linux instead.  Demanding long term
support commitment from volunteers is just bizarre, since pretty soon, you
won't have many volunteers left, with the ones still remaining consistently
lying to you as everyone will know that the promises they are making can't
be enforced.....  As for code from companies, has Linus gotten a signed
support contract from IBM for JFS?  If he asked, do you really think they
would agree to one?

So this business of demanding a perpetual support contract from Hans for R3
before you even let R4 into the kernel is patently absurd.  Such a contract
won't be needed once R4 gets into widespread use and stabilizes, allowing
R3 users to switch over to it, never mind that this has not been required
to my knowledge of anyone else.  Either you're putting the cart before the
horse on this one without realizing it, or you're just another member of
the 'say-no-to-change' group (or worse, the say-no-to-Hans group) using any
excuse that pops into your head for why you keep saying 'no'.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[David Lang]

On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Ed Cogburn wrote:

> Maybe its because Hans and Co., having only a finite amount of dev time,
> would much prefer to spend that time on R4 rather than R3?  Maybe if we
> were to let R4 into the kernel, it wouldn't be long after that R3 could be
> retired because everyone has moved to R4?  Maybe if R4 had been allowed
> into the mainstream kernel a year ago, this ENTIRE ARGUMENT would be moot?
>
> Since when has there been a requirement for all new code to have a signed
> support contract before it enters the kernel?  Don't tell me this is
> normal, because I damn well know its not.  Early on and for the most part
> even today, good stuff gets into the kernel without any explicit or at
> least meaningful promises of long term support.  That stuff stays in the
> kernel as long as there is someone willing to maintain it, and it
> disappears from the kernel when there is no one left willing to keep it
> up-to-date.  That has always been the basic rule, without it Linux would
> never have gone beyond the stage of being Linus's toy, because if Linus had
> demanded such a support commitment up front, people would have lost
> interest in hacking on his toy.
>
> Devs should be free to work on whatever they want, because most of them are
> doing this on their own time anyway, otherwise they might just decide to
> hack on some other OS, or a fork of Linux instead.  Demanding long term
> support commitment from volunteers is just bizarre, since pretty soon, you
> won't have many volunteers left, with the ones still remaining consistently
> lying to you as everyone will know that the promises they are making can't
> be enforced.....  As for code from companies, has Linus gotten a signed
> support contract from IBM for JFS?  If he asked, do you really think they
> would agree to one?
>
> So this business of demanding a perpetual support contract from Hans for R3
> before you even let R4 into the kernel is patently absurd.  Such a contract
> won't be needed once R4 gets into widespread use and stabilizes, allowing
> R3 users to switch over to it, never mind that this has not been required
> to my knowledge of anyone else.  Either you're putting the cart before the
> horse on this one without realizing it, or you're just another member of
> the 'say-no-to-change' group (or worse, the say-no-to-Hans group) using any
> excuse that pops into your head for why you keep saying 'no'.
>

it's not that they are being asked to commit to a perpetual support 
contract, it's the fact that they AREN'T being asked to commit to a 
perpetual support contract that makes it more important that the code that 
they are asking to be merged must fit in well with the code and the 
philosphy of the rest of the kernel so that it can be supported well by 
others

if the kernel folks don't agree with the underlying design they may end up 
accepting it for a while, but will rip it out as soon as they get an 
excuse (see devfs for a perfect example)

David Lang

--
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
  -- C.A.R. Hoare

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Horst von Brand]

Ed Cogburn <edcogburn@hotpop.com> wrote:
> David Lang wrote:
> > On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Ed Tomlinson wrote:

> >> No Flame from me.  One thing to remember is that Hans and friends
> >> _have_ supported R3 for years.

They let it fall into disrepair when they started work on 4.

> >>                                This is an undisputed fact.

Exactly.

> >>                                                            Second
> >> third parties have be able to add much function (like journaling)
> >> to R3 so the code must be sort of readable...

Why don't you check it? Wouldn't you much prefer if the original authors
(or somebody similarly initmate with the code) did mayor surgery on it?
Specially if it is something you depend on?

> >> With R4 they have created a new FS that is _fast_

Remains to be seen.

> >>                                                   and _can_ do things
> >> no other FS can

Mostly useless things...

> >>                  - I also expect they have written cleaner code...

Better check first.

> >> Why are we fighting about adding this sort of function to the kernel?

Because the filessytem experts in the kernel development crowd (and others)
have /serious/ problems with the ideas and the code?

> >> Yes it may not be the absolute best way to do things.  How many times
> >> has tcpip be rewritten for linux?  The answer is more than once.

So?

> >> Lets put R4 in, see how it works, generalize the ideas and if we have
> >> to rewrite and rethink part of it lets do so.

Why not: Let's keep it out, fix the problems that it has and evaluate it
for inclusion once the problems have been ironed out?  That has been the
policy for everything else as far as I can remember (and that is from
nearly the beginning...)

> > remember that Hans is on record (over a year ago) arguing that R3 should
> > not be fixed becouse R4 was replacing it.

> > This type of thing is one of the reasons that you see arguments that
> > aren't 'purely code-related' becouse the kernel folks realize that _they_
> > will have to maintain the code over time, Hans and company will go on and
> > develop R5 (R10, whatever) and consider R4 obsolete and stop maintaining
> > it.

> Maybe its because Hans and Co., having only a finite amount of dev time,
> would much prefer to spend that time on R4 rather than R3?

ext2 is still being maintained alongside ext3.
 
>                                                            Maybe if we
> were to let R4 into the kernel, it wouldn't be long after that R3 could be
> retired because everyone has moved to R4?

ext3 is several years old, and there are /still/ ext2 users around...

[...]

> Devs should be free to work on whatever they want, because most of them are
> doing this on their own time anyway, otherwise they might just decide to
> hack on some other OS, or a fork of Linux instead.

Nobody forces anybody to work on Linux, or even on the standard Linus
kernel. It is the ReiserFS crowd who are demanding something from the Linux
crowd, not the other way around.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                     Fono: +56 32 654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria              +56 32 654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile                Fax:  +56 32 797513

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Ed Tomlinson]

On Sunday 10 July 2005 01:10, Horst von Brand wrote:
> Ed Cogburn <edcogburn@hotpop.com> wrote:
> > David Lang wrote:
> > > On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
> 
> > >> No Flame from me.  One thing to remember is that Hans and friends
> > >> _have_ supported R3 for years.
> 
> They let it fall into disrepair when they started work on 4.
> 
> > >>                                This is an undisputed fact.
> 
> Exactly.

This is FUD.  Hans do you have figures on how many fixes for R3 have
been added in the last year or so?

> > >>                                                            Second
> > >> third parties have be able to add much function (like journaling)
> > >> to R3 so the code must be sort of readable...
> 
> Why don't you check it? Wouldn't you much prefer if the original authors
> (or somebody similarly initmate with the code) did mayor surgery on it?
> Specially if it is something you depend on?
> 
> > >> With R4 they have created a new FS that is _fast_
> 
> Remains to be seen.
> 
> > >>                                                   and _can_ do things
> > >> no other FS can
> 
> Mostly useless things...

Just because you do not see how to use a new feature does not mean its useless...
 
> > >>                  - I also expect they have written cleaner code...
> 
> Better check first.
> 
> > >> Why are we fighting about adding this sort of function to the kernel?
> 
> Because the filessytem experts in the kernel development crowd (and others)
> have /serious/ problems with the ideas and the code?
> 
> > >> Yes it may not be the absolute best way to do things.  How many times
> > >> has tcpip be rewritten for linux?  The answer is more than once.
> 
> So?
> 
> > >> Lets put R4 in, see how it works, generalize the ideas and if we have
> > >> to rewrite and rethink part of it lets do so.
> 
> Why not: Let's keep it out, fix the problems that it has and evaluate it
> for inclusion once the problems have been ironed out?  That has been the
> policy for everything else as far as I can remember (and that is from
> nearly the beginning...)

When you are exploring new stuff its almost impossible to see the best way to
do things.  Once R4 (and other FSes) use these new features (or not) it will become more
obvious how they should be coded.  As it is not its a bit like trying to decide your
new baby will be a doctor when he/she grows up - its not something you can
predict.

> > > remember that Hans is on record (over a year ago) arguing that R3 should
> > > not be fixed becouse R4 was replacing it.
> 
> > > This type of thing is one of the reasons that you see arguments that
> > > aren't 'purely code-related' becouse the kernel folks realize that _they_
> > > will have to maintain the code over time, Hans and company will go on and
> > > develop R5 (R10, whatever) and consider R4 obsolete and stop maintaining
> > > it.
> 
> > Maybe its because Hans and Co., having only a finite amount of dev time,
> > would much prefer to spend that time on R4 rather than R3?
> 
> ext2 is still being maintained alongside ext3.

And so is R3 - just no new features are being added...
 
> >                                                            Maybe if we
> > were to let R4 into the kernel, it wouldn't be long after that R3 could be
> > retired because everyone has moved to R4?
> 
> ext3 is several years old, and there are /still/ ext2 users around...
> 
See above - this should presend NO problems.

> > Devs should be free to work on whatever they want, because most of them are
> > doing this on their own time anyway, otherwise they might just decide to
> > hack on some other OS, or a fork of Linux instead.
> 
> Nobody forces anybody to work on Linux, or even on the standard Linus
> kernel. It is the ReiserFS crowd who are demanding something from the Linux
> crowd, not the other way around.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Alexey Dobriyan]

On Sunday 10 July 2005 16:48, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
> On Sunday 10 July 2005 01:10, Horst von Brand wrote:
> > Ed Cogburn <edcogburn@hotpop.com> wrote:
> > > David Lang wrote:
> > > > On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
> > 
> > > >> No Flame from me.  One thing to remember is that Hans and friends
> > > >> _have_ supported R3 for years.
> > 
> > They let it fall into disrepair when they started work on 4.
> > 
> > > >>                                This is an undisputed fact.
> > 
> > Exactly.
> 
> This is FUD.  Hans do you have figures on how many fixes for R3 have
> been added in the last year or so?

You don't need Hans to find out how many. linux.bkbits.net is still online.

http://linux.bkbits.net:8080/linux-2.6/src/fs/reiserfs?nav=index.html|src/|src/fs

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Jim Crilly]

On 07/10/05 08:06:26PM +0400, Alexey Dobriyan wrote:
> On Sunday 10 July 2005 16:48, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
> > On Sunday 10 July 2005 01:10, Horst von Brand wrote:
> > > Ed Cogburn <edcogburn@hotpop.com> wrote:
> > > > David Lang wrote:
> > > > > On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
> > > 
> > > > >> No Flame from me.  One thing to remember is that Hans and friends
> > > > >> _have_ supported R3 for years.
> > > 
> > > They let it fall into disrepair when they started work on 4.
> > > 
> > > > >>                                This is an undisputed fact.
> > > 
> > > Exactly.
> > 
> > This is FUD.  Hans do you have figures on how many fixes for R3 have
> > been added in the last year or so?
> 
> You don't need Hans to find out how many. linux.bkbits.net is still online.
> 
> http://linux.bkbits.net:8080/linux-2.6/src/fs/reiserfs?nav=index.html|src/|src/fs

Which seems to support the notion that namesys stopped support for reiser3
when reiser4 was started. The tracking of who submittend and who committed
patches wasn't there just over a year ago so sometimes it's hard to tell 
who actually posted that patch if someone like Andrew or Linus committed it. 
But in most of the changesets on the bkbits site you can go back over 2 years 
and not see anything from namesys people. Nearly all of the fixes commited
in the past 2-3 years are from SuSe.

Jim.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Ed Cogburn]

Jim Crilly wrote:

> But in most of the changesets on the bkbits site you can go back over 2
> years and not see anything from namesys people. Nearly all of the fixes 
> commited in the past 2-3 years are from SuSe.


So, for the sake of argument, if IBM were to drop official support for JFS,
we'd yank JFS out of the kernel even if there was someone else willing to
support it?  Why does it now *matter* who supports it, as long as its being
maintained?  And will we now block IBM's hypothetical JFS2 from the kernel
if IBM, from the programmers up to the CEO, doesn't swear on their momma's
grave that they'll continue to support JFS1, even if JFS1 is being
supported by others?  Jeez, this is why it doesn't take a kernel dev to see
the problems here, common sense seems to be an increasingly rare ingredient
in these arguments against R4.  If I didn't know better, I'd think you were
making this stuff up as you went along....

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[David Lang]

On Sun, 10 Jul 2005, Ed Cogburn wrote:

>> But in most of the changesets on the bkbits site you can go back over 2
>> years and not see anything from namesys people. Nearly all of the fixes
>> commited in the past 2-3 years are from SuSe.
>
>
> So, for the sake of argument, if IBM were to drop official support for JFS,
> we'd yank JFS out of the kernel even if there was someone else willing to
> support it?  Why does it now *matter* who supports it, as long as its being
> maintained?  And will we now block IBM's hypothetical JFS2 from the kernel
> if IBM, from the programmers up to the CEO, doesn't swear on their momma's
> grave that they'll continue to support JFS1, even if JFS1 is being
> supported by others?  Jeez, this is why it doesn't take a kernel dev to see
> the problems here, common sense seems to be an increasingly rare ingredient
> in these arguments against R4.  If I didn't know better, I'd think you were
> making this stuff up as you went along....

you are completely missing the point.

the fact that the kernel group is going to have to maintain the code over 
the long run means that it must be acceptable to them before it gets 
added.

so saying that it's supported (for now) by namesys doesn't matter. if it's 
not something that is in a state that can be maintained over the long 
term by the kernel group then it can't be accepted, exactly BECOUSE nobody 
expects an outside orginization to maintain the code forever.

Namesys is allowed to maintain the code themselves outside the kernel for 
as long as they want to (and even fork the kernel if they need to make 
changes to it that aren't acceptable to the mainline). Namesys is asking 
the core kernel team to accept their code into the mainline so that it 
will be maintained by the core kernel team for the indefinate future. This 
is why it's up to Namesys to satisfy the concerns of the core team, not 
the other way around.

David Lang

-- 
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
  -- C.A.R. Hoare

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Jim Crilly]

On 07/10/05 08:01:26PM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> Jim Crilly wrote:
> 
> > But in most of the changesets on the bkbits site you can go back over 2
> > years and not see anything from namesys people. Nearly all of the fixes 
> > commited in the past 2-3 years are from SuSe.
> 
> 
> So, for the sake of argument, if IBM were to drop official support for JFS,
> we'd yank JFS out of the kernel even if there was someone else willing to
> support it?  Why does it now *matter* who supports it, as long as its being
> maintained?  And will we now block IBM's hypothetical JFS2 from the kernel
> if IBM, from the programmers up to the CEO, doesn't swear on their momma's
> grave that they'll continue to support JFS1, even if JFS1 is being
> supported by others?  Jeez, this is why it doesn't take a kernel dev to see
> the problems here, common sense seems to be an increasingly rare ingredient
> in these arguments against R4.  If I didn't know better, I'd think you were
> making this stuff up as you went along....

Someone other than Namesys maintaing the filesystem isn't the problem. XFS
for instance has had a lot of work done by non-SGI employees after it's
merge, but SGI doesn't release a new filesystem every 3 years with the
desire to remove and replace the old one. The main problems with reiser4
have been beat to death, if you don't get it by now chances are that you
won't. Having Hans and team run off to work on reiser5 6 months after
inclusion is an issue, since it seems to have happened before, but it's a
minor one as long as reiser4 is merged in a state where it can be manged by
other people without too much trouble.

Jim.

> 
> 
> 
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Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Ed Cogburn]

Jim Crilly wrote:

> but SGI doesn't release a new filesystem every 3 years with the
> desire to remove and replace the old one.

Read Han's reply to Ed T. nearby.  This is why I should have followed my own
original intent and not gotten back into this flamefest, as this response
is the same kind of bullshit that's been repeated over and over again.  My
mistake, won't happen again.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Jim Crilly]

On 07/10/05 10:43:03PM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> Jim Crilly wrote:
> 
> > but SGI doesn't release a new filesystem every 3 years with the
> > desire to remove and replace the old one.
> 
> Read Han's reply to Ed T. nearby.  This is why I should have followed my own
> original intent and not gotten back into this flamefest, as this response
> is the same kind of bullshit that's been repeated over and over again.  My
> mistake, won't happen again.

I did read Hans' reply, but why should I believe him? When I was
skimming the csets on the bk site most of the changes looked like small
fixes or code migration stuff that touched all filesystems. And I don't even 
know what 'features' he's saying were added that he didn't sanction. I
obviously didn't read all of the log entries so it's definately possible
the big stuff he's talking about was completely missed by me, but I would
bet that his > 2/3 number is prett far off because every time I give
reiser3 a try something eventually goes wrong and I end up back on XFS or
ext3 because they're more reliable.

Jim.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Ed Tomlinson]

On Sunday 10 July 2005 20:01, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> Jim Crilly wrote:
> 
> > But in most of the changesets on the bkbits site you can go back over 2
> > years and not see anything from namesys people. Nearly all of the fixes 
> > commited in the past 2-3 years are from SuSe.

With Chris Mason's name attached?  Chris wrote the journaling support for R3
and worked for SUSE for a while (he may still?).   I also remember seeing quite
a few patches run though the reiser mailing list for comment...
  
> So, for the sake of argument, if IBM were to drop official support for JFS,
> we'd yank JFS out of the kernel even if there was someone else willing to
> support it?  Why does it now *matter* who supports it, as long as its being
> maintained?  And will we now block IBM's hypothetical JFS2 from the kernel
> if IBM, from the programmers up to the CEO, doesn't swear on their momma's
> grave that they'll continue to support JFS1, even if JFS1 is being
> supported by others?  Jeez, this is why it doesn't take a kernel dev to see
> the problems here, common sense seems to be an increasingly rare ingredient
> in these arguments against R4.  If I didn't know better, I'd think you were
> making this stuff up as you went along....

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Jim Crilly]

On 07/11/05 07:09:46AM -0400, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
> On Sunday 10 July 2005 20:01, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> > Jim Crilly wrote:
> > 
> > > But in most of the changesets on the bkbits site you can go back over 2
> > > years and not see anything from namesys people. Nearly all of the fixes 
> > > commited in the past 2-3 years are from SuSe.
> 
> With Chris Mason's name attached?  Chris wrote the journaling support for R3
> and worked for SUSE for a while (he may still?).   I also remember seeing quite
> a few patches run though the reiser mailing list for comment...
>  

I thought r3 was journaled from the beginning; the Namesys site credits
Chris with the addition of a relocated and large journal. And yes, a good
bit of the patches were from him.

Jim.

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Hans Reiser]

Jim Crilly wrote:

>
>I thought r3 was journaled from the beginning; the Namesys site credits
>Chris with the addition of a relocated and large journal. And yes, a good
>bit of the patches were from him.
>

Chris and I disagree about QA methodology, but I am deeply in debt to
him for his contributions.  R3 did not have a journal at first, that was
his contribution, and a major part of what made reiserfs useful to real
users.

Hans

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Hans Reiser]

Ed Tomlinson wrote:

>On Sunday 10 July 2005 01:10, Horst von Brand wrote:
>  
>
>>Ed Cogburn <edcogburn@hotpop.com> wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>David Lang wrote:
>>>      
>>>
>>>>On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>>>No Flame from me.  One thing to remember is that Hans and friends
>>>>>_have_ supported R3 for years.
>>>>>          
>>>>>
>>They let it fall into disrepair when they started work on 4.
>>    
>>
>
>This is FUD.  Hans do you have figures on how many fixes for R3 have
>been added in the last year or so?
>  
>
No, but I can tell you that > 2/3 were related to features I thought
should have been put in V4 instead, and were added in violation of my
declared code freeze and without my consent.  Naturally, those bugs were
routed to the authors of those features.

There were maybe 2 bugs in the last 18 months in code not related to
code freeze violations, I don't remember exactly.

There is a simple reason why Namesys no longer spends much time on bug
fixes for V3.  The frozen code is too stable to generate bug reports to
work on, and the unfrozen code is not ours.  If the unfrozen code
stopped being maintained, I'd have to do something.

It seems to me that you should all hope that V4 gets to where Namesys
does not spend much time maintaining it.  It means we have no bug reports.

Stable branches, and development branches, and only bug fixes get added
to the stable branch, it is an old paradigm, and broadly speaking it is
still the right paradigm.

Guys, Horst is trolling.    He has never used our code, and yet.....

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Erik Hensema]

Horst von Brand (vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl):
[on reiserfs4]
>> >>                                                   and _can_ do things
>> >> no other FS can
>
> Mostly useless things...

Depends on your point of view. If you define things to be useful
only when POSIX requires them, then yes, reiser4 contains a lot
of useless stuff.
However, it's the 'beyond POSIX'-stuff what makes reiser4
interesting.

Multistream files have been useful on other OSses for years. They
might be useful on Linux too (Samba will surely like them).

The plugin architecture is very interesting. Sometimes you don't
need files to be in the POSIX namespace. Why would you want to
store a mysql database in files? Why not skip the overhead of the
VFS and POSIX rules and just store them in a more efficient way?
Maybe you can create a swapfile plugin. No need for a swapfile to
be in the POSIX namespace either.
It's just a fun thing to experiment with. It's not always
nescesary to let the demand create the means. Give programmers
some powerful tools and wait and see what wonderful things start
to evolve.

And yes, maybe in ten years time POSIX is just a subsystem in
Linux. Maybe commerciale Unix vendors will start following Linux
as 'the' standard instead of the other way around. Seems fun to
me :-)

I think this debate will mostly boil down to 'do we want to
experiment with beyond-POSIX filesystems in linux?'.
Clearly we don't _need_ it now. There simply are no users. But
will users come when reiser4 is merged? Nobody knows.

IMHO reiser4 should be merged and be marked as experimental. It
should probably _always_ be marked as experimental, because we
_know_ we're going to need some other -- more generic -- API when
we decide we like the features of reiser4. The reiser4 APIs
should probably be implemented as generic VFS APIs. But since we
don't know yet what features we're going to use, let reiser4 be
self contained. Maybe reiser5 or reiser6 will follow standard
VFS-beyond-POSIX rules, with ext4 and JFS2 also implementing them.

It's just too damn hard to predict the future. IMHO better just
merge reiser4 and let it be clear to everybody that reiser4 is an
experiment.
As long as it doesn't affect the rest of the kernel and it's
clear to the users that reiser4 is *not* going to be the
standard, it's fine with me.

-- 
Erik Hensema <erik@hensema.net>

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Horst von Brand]

Erik Hensema <erik@hensema.net> wrote:
> Horst von Brand (vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl):
> [on reiserfs4]
> >> >>                                                   and _can_ do things
> >> >> no other FS can

> > Mostly useless things...

> Depends on your point of view. If you define things to be useful
> only when POSIX requires them, then yes, reiser4 contains a lot
> of useless stuff.

That isn't my definition.

> However, it's the 'beyond POSIX'-stuff what makes reiser4
> interesting.

I haven't seen a shred of evidence of that up to here. Just redoing
in-kernel (for completely inscrutable reasons) stuff that has been
confortably done in userland for many years isn't "Interesting", quite the
contrary.

> Multistream files have been useful on other OSses for years.

I only have seen other OSes moving away from such stuff...

>                                                              They
> might be useful on Linux too (Samba will surely like them).

OK, if you think Windows is a good idea all around...

> The plugin architecture is very interesting.

Again: It isn't "plugins", it's "kernel configuration options redefining
the filesystem layout". And that is extremely toxic: If the claims are to
be believed, somebody using ReiserFS 4 could end up using filesystems as
widely different as ext3 and ufs today. Both called the same. Or everybody
will end up using the exact same set of "plugins", so they make no sense as
configuration options. Sure, it is nice to have different versions of the
same filesystem (in a way, ext3 is a version of ext2; in ext3 there are
some options that where introduced later, and some of which aren't
backwards-compatible), but this is not something I would want each
individual user screw around with willy-nilly. So the whole "plugin" idea
is very questionable to me.

>                                              Sometimes you don't
> need files to be in the POSIX namespace.

The POSIX namespace /is/ the namespace for files.

>                                          Why would you want to
> store a mysql database in files?

Because it is the abstraction of permanent storage that the OS gives me. Or
I could write them directly on a raw block device for performance (by
cutting out a middleman).

>                                  Why not skip the overhead of the
> VFS and POSIX rules and just store them in a more efficient way?

Exactly. Cut out the filesystem.

> Maybe you can create a swapfile plugin.

The kernel manages swapping on files and devices just fine, thank you.

>                                         No need for a swapfile to
> be in the POSIX namespace either.

And how do you handle it if it has no filename?!

> It's just a fun thing to experiment with.

Noone here is stopping you from experimenting.

>                                           It's not always
> nescesary to let the demand create the means. Give programmers
> some powerful tools and wait and see what wonderful things start
> to evolve.

The sad truth is that if you give a random collection of people powerful
tools they misuse them more often than not, creating a huge mess in the
process. That is why it is so hard to design good tools.

> And yes, maybe in ten years time POSIX is just a subsystem in
> Linux. Maybe commerciale Unix vendors will start following Linux
> as 'the' standard instead of the other way around. Seems fun to
> me :-)

To me too. But forcing Linux today to be as non-POSIX as possible, just so
it will be prepared for 10 years in the future makes no sense, because you
break it /now/.

> I think this debate will mostly boil down to 'do we want to
> experiment with beyond-POSIX filesystems in linux?'.

You (and some others) clearly want to. More power to the bunch that comes
up with clean semantics that can be implemented efficiently and are useful
in real life (as opposed to "it would be oh-so-nice to also have $FEATURE
for my pet $NICHE_CASE, feature for which I just can't be bothered
considering ramifications at all"). Before going off look up "featuritis"
(and consider how it all but killed off a lot of OSes, even many Unix
variants, and uncountable other things too).
 
> Clearly we don't _need_ it now. There simply are no users. But
> will users come when reiser4 is merged? Nobody knows.

Probably a tiny minority. Something like the following ReiserFS 3 has
today.

> IMHO reiser4 should be merged and be marked as experimental.

IMHO ReiserFS 4 should not be merged into Linus' kernel. So what? It is not
my call (nor yours).

>                                                              It
> should probably _always_ be marked as experimental, because we
> _know_ we're going to need some other -- more generic -- API when
> we decide we like the features of reiser4. The reiser4 APIs
> should probably be implemented as generic VFS APIs. But since we
> don't know yet what features we're going to use, let reiser4 be
> self contained. Maybe reiser5 or reiser6 will follow standard
> VFS-beyond-POSIX rules, with ext4 and JFS2 also implementing them.

If is is /that/ experimental, it has no place in Linus' kernel at all. It
is not (and has not been for a half dozen years at least) a playground for
random experiments. Sure, you can fork off a branch for fooling around, you
are even wellcome to keep your laboratory synched up with the version
everybody is using, if that serves your needs.

> It's just too damn hard to predict the future.

Right. Instead of gambling it will turn out just as you think (why should I
give /your/ view more weight than mine? or prefer views which have shown to
be erroneous over the view of people who /have/ shaped the present we are
in today?), why not wait and see?

>                                                IMHO better just
> merge reiser4 and let it be clear to everybody that reiser4 is an
> experiment.

IMHO much simpler just leaving experiments to experimental branches.

> As long as it doesn't affect the rest of the kernel

Impossible.

>                                                      and it's
> clear to the users that reiser4 is *not* going to be the
> standard, it's fine with me.

Now I'm at a complete loss... Why should it be placed in the standard
kernel then?
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                     Fono: +56 32 654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria              +56 32 654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile                Fax:  +56 32 797513

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Hans Reiser]

Horst von Brand wrote:

>
>
>  
>
>>                                          It's not always
>>nescesary to let the demand create the means. Give programmers
>>some powerful tools and wait and see what wonderful things start
>>to evolve.
>>    
>>
>
>The sad truth is that if you give a random collection of people powerful
>tools they misuse them more often than not, creating a huge mess in the
>process. That is why it is so hard to design good tools.
>  
>
We are rope makers.  Our job is to make good rope.  If someone might use
it to hang dissidents, that does not mean we should now make the rope
too inflexible to form a noose.  It is important that we know our
place.  Our place is to help users express themselves the way they want
to.  It is not our job to keep them from hanging dissidents.  If they
hang dissidents, we should not change the way we make rope, we should
shoot them.   Most of our users don't hang dissidents, to the contrary,
they do work of value to society, and need their time saved so that they
can do more of it.

The users of reiser4 know a lot more than I do, and are much wiser than
I am.  Because I focus on a narrow little area, I am able to do
something useful to help them express their greater wisdom more
flexibly.  I take pride in that.

The belief expressed above that powerful tools will be misused more than
well used, and the dislike of power for the users it contains, is why we
will never do more than talk past each other.  Perhaps we should just
agree to disagree.

Hans

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Erik Hensema]

Horst von Brand (vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl):
> Erik Hensema <erik@hensema.net> wrote:
>> Horst von Brand (vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl):
>> [on reiserfs4]
>> >> >>                                                   and _can_ do things
>> >> >> no other FS can
>
>> > Mostly useless things...
>
>> Depends on your point of view. If you define things to be useful
>> only when POSIX requires them, then yes, reiser4 contains a lot
>> of useless stuff.
>
> That isn't my definition.

Ok. It seems to be the definition of some people over here tough.

>> However, it's the 'beyond POSIX'-stuff what makes reiser4
>> interesting.
>
> I haven't seen a shred of evidence of that up to here. Just redoing
> in-kernel (for completely inscrutable reasons) stuff that has been
> confortably done in userland for many years isn't "Interesting", quite the
> contrary.

Some things simply need to be done inside the kernel for
atomicity, especially when mixing 'normal' posix applications
with apps using extended semantics.

>> Multistream files have been useful on other OSses for years.
>
> I only have seen other OSes moving away from such stuff...

That would be OSX I guesss.
>>                                                              They
>> might be useful on Linux too (Samba will surely like them).
>
> OK, if you think Windows is a good idea all around...

Windows is a fact of life, like it or not. Every Linux+Samba
server replacing a Win2k3 server is a win, IMHO.

>> The plugin architecture is very interesting.
>
> Again: It isn't "plugins", it's "kernel configuration options redefining
> the filesystem layout". And that is extremely toxic: If the claims are to
> be believed, somebody using ReiserFS 4 could end up using filesystems as
> widely different as ext3 and ufs today. Both called the same. Or everybody
> will end up using the exact same set of "plugins", so they make no sense as
> configuration options. Sure, it is nice to have different versions of the
> same filesystem (in a way, ext3 is a version of ext2; in ext3 there are
> some options that where introduced later, and some of which aren't
> backwards-compatible), but this is not something I would want each
> individual user screw around with willy-nilly. So the whole "plugin" idea
> is very questionable to me.

Not every plugin changes the filesystem layout. Plugins can also
change higher level APIs. 

Changing the filesystem layout is quite dangerous indeed. Hans,
is a list of required plugins stored in the superblock?

>> need files to be in the POSIX namespace.
>
> The POSIX namespace /is/ the namespace for files.

It doesn't need to be the namespace for _all_ files.

>>                                          Why would you want to
>> store a mysql database in files?
>
> Because it is the abstraction of permanent storage that the OS gives me. Or
> I could write them directly on a raw block device for performance (by
> cutting out a middleman).

Reiser4 could offer you a differend kind of abstraction. I don't
know if it would be useful in the mysql case, I don't write
database software.
Mysql is just a random example of software needing to store data
somewhere. The data is only accessable through the mysql api.
Backing up the files is useles when the server is running.

>
>>                                  Why not skip the overhead of the
>> VFS and POSIX rules and just store them in a more efficient way?
>
> Exactly. Cut out the filesystem.
>
>> Maybe you can create a swapfile plugin.
>
> The kernel manages swapping on files and devices just fine, thank you.

Just a random example.

>>                                         No need for a swapfile to
>> be in the POSIX namespace either.
>
> And how do you handle it if it has no filename?!

mkswap --kind=reiser4fsswap --operation=create

whatever.

>> It's just a fun thing to experiment with.
>
> Noone here is stopping you from experimenting.
>
>>                                           It's not always
>> nescesary to let the demand create the means. Give programmers
>> some powerful tools and wait and see what wonderful things start
>> to evolve.
>
> The sad truth is that if you give a random collection of people powerful
> tools they misuse them more often than not, creating a huge mess in the
> process. That is why it is so hard to design good tools.

Agreed. That's why you need to experiment.

>> And yes, maybe in ten years time POSIX is just a subsystem in
>> Linux. Maybe commerciale Unix vendors will start following Linux
>> as 'the' standard instead of the other way around. Seems fun to
>> me :-)
>
> To me too. But forcing Linux today to be as non-POSIX as possible, just so
> it will be prepared for 10 years in the future makes no sense, because you
> break it /now/.

Linux will still be posix. video4linux isn't posix either. I
don't see why access to data stores should be posix all the time.

>> I think this debate will mostly boil down to 'do we want to
>> experiment with beyond-POSIX filesystems in linux?'.
>
> You (and some others) clearly want to. More power to the bunch that comes
> up with clean semantics that can be implemented efficiently and are useful
> in real life (as opposed to "it would be oh-so-nice to also have $FEATURE
> for my pet $NICHE_CASE, feature for which I just can't be bothered
> considering ramifications at all"). Before going off look up "featuritis"
> (and consider how it all but killed off a lot of OSes, even many Unix
> variants, and uncountable other things too).

Extending a filesystem beyond the standard POSIX semantics is a
huge step. Not even a company as large as Microsoft can make the
next step in filesystem design (WinFS). It must be done in small
steps. Reiser4 is one of these small steps. Maybe the step isn't
quite in the right direction, but I don't think it will be a
detour either.

>> Clearly we don't _need_ it now. There simply are no users. But
>> will users come when reiser4 is merged? Nobody knows.
>
> Probably a tiny minority. Something like the following ReiserFS 3 has
> today.

Do you include Reiser3 users in the tiny minority? Both SuSE and
Gentoo use reiser3 as their default filesystem. Both distro's are
huge.
Both ext3 and reiser3 have a huge number of users. Both
filesystems also have got a number of religious followers. Ignore
them. Religion is no basis for a healty debate.

>> IMHO reiser4 should be merged and be marked as experimental.
>
> IMHO ReiserFS 4 should not be merged into Linus' kernel. So what? It is not
> my call (nor yours).

By having this discussion we shape our opinions. We inspire
others to form their own opinion. Maybe we even inspire Linus to
have an opinion on the matter. Who knows.

>> should probably _always_ be marked as experimental, because we
>> _know_ we're going to need some other -- more generic -- API when
>> we decide we like the features of reiser4. The reiser4 APIs
>> should probably be implemented as generic VFS APIs. But since we
>> don't know yet what features we're going to use, let reiser4 be
>> self contained. Maybe reiser5 or reiser6 will follow standard
>> VFS-beyond-POSIX rules, with ext4 and JFS2 also implementing them.
>
> If is is /that/ experimental, it has no place in Linus' kernel at all. It
> is not (and has not been for a half dozen years at least) a playground for
> random experiments. Sure, you can fork off a branch for fooling around, you
> are even wellcome to keep your laboratory synched up with the version
> everybody is using, if that serves your needs.

I don't think it's a random experiment. Sure, it *is* an
experiment. IPv6 has been an experiment for some time too.

Sometimes you simply need to experiment on a larger scale than
possible simply in a private kernel fork. Why would Samba support
multi-fork files when almost nobody has access to kernels
supporting those files? Why would INN store its newsspool in
reiser4? Why would people think about the possibilities when the
standard kernel doesn't offer them?

>> It's just too damn hard to predict the future.
>
> Right. Instead of gambling it will turn out just as you think (why should I
> give /your/ view more weight than mine? or prefer views which have shown to
> be erroneous over the view of people who /have/ shaped the present we are
> in today?), why not wait and see?

Wait and see what others do? Clone their inventions? Chasing
taillights? Isn't Open Source the place where innovation is
supposed to happen?

>>                                                IMHO better just
>> merge reiser4 and let it be clear to everybody that reiser4 is an
>> experiment.
>
> IMHO much simpler just leaving experiments to experimental branches.

The simplest option is to stop developing linux, except for new
hardware drivers.

>> As long as it doesn't affect the rest of the kernel
>
> Impossible.

Then make sure those effects are positive. If you can say
'reiser4 got $feature wrong and I can do better' then that's a
win.

>>                                                      and it's
>> clear to the users that reiser4 is *not* going to be the
>> standard, it's fine with me.
>
> Now I'm at a complete loss... Why should it be placed in the standard
> kernel then?

Scale. Small experiments are fun, large experiments are even more
fun ;-)

-- 
Erik Hensema <erik@hensema.net>

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Hans Reiser]

David Lang wrote:

>
> remember that Hans is on record (over a year ago) arguing that R3
> should not be fixed becouse R4 was replacing it.

No, I said and say that V3 should not have features added to it, because
features should not be added to a stable branch.  Bug fixes are good.

There are a few V3 bug fixes where the fix is so deep that it belongs in
V4, all of the ones that I can think of at the moment are ones requiring
disk format changes.

Note that in V4, disk format changes are no longer deep fixes because of
plugins.

>
> This type of thing is one of the reasons that you see arguments that
> aren't 'purely code-related' becouse the kernel folks realize that
> _they_ will have to maintain the code over time, Hans and company will
> go on and develop R5 (R10, whatever) and consider R4 obsolete and stop
> maintaining it.

No, we will stop adding features to it at some point, only add bug
fixes, and let it become stable enough for mission critical use.  Of
course, with plugins this becomes more complicated of a policy because
smaller releases with more orthogonal features are easier and more
tempting, and it becomes tempting to version and release plugins rather
than the FS, so I am not sure exactly how this will play out yet.  I
think we will have an option to select experimental plugins individually.

>
> David Lang
>

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Jens Axboe]

On Sun, Jul 03 2005, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> Jim Crilly wrote:
> 
> > From a user's standpoint, no of course not. But once it's included in the
> > mainline it's forced upon the kernel maintainers
> 
> 
> No it isn't.  Its just like any other optional feature.  If it stays
> unmaintained for too long it just gets removed from the kernel, this
> happens all the time.  This is another one of those non-issues that isn't
> relevent to this discussion but is being used to avoid the real issue.  Go

Yeah right, you really nailed that one, Ed. You obviously have years of
kernel maintenance under your belt.

-- 
Jens Axboe

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Maciej Soltysiak]

Ed Cogburn wrote:

> Here's the irony of your statement:  -mm is too unstable for many people to
> even try out R4 with, breaking or freezing or having other problems long
> before they even get to R4 itself.
I remember that Con Kolivas had r4 in his -ck patchset for a bit.

He dropped it, but a fair amount of people is using -ck as it is
stable, so maybe, if that is not too much for Con, he could merge r4
with his patchset or create an additional -ck-r4

Just a vague thought.

Waddya think? Con?

Regards,
Maciej

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Horst von Brand]

Ed Cogburn <edcogburn@hotpop.com> wrote:
> Jim Crilly wrote:
> > On 07/02/05 09:05:41AM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> >> Jim Crilly wrote:

> >> Assuming "fast and cool" here equates to some level of improvement to the
> >> existing kernel, and/or new features/capabilities not currently
> >> available, then are you saying "fast and cool" isn't good enough anymore,
> >> you now have to be politically correct and socially popular and a master
> >> brown-noser as well to get code into the kernel even just on an
> >> *experimental* basis?

> > Fast and cool by themselves shouldn't be good enough, infact fast could
> > definately be optional

> And please point out where anyone has said ANYWHERE that R4 is going to be
> FORCED on people!  Stop accusing Hans of refusing to answer relevent points
> when you're doing the same damn thing.

Even if I'm not forced to /use/ it, if it gets shoved into the kernel, it
is being forced on me. You are talking to /kernel developers/ here, who
care for the /code/; not /users/, who only care for whatever their
distribution dishes up (leaving out experimental/unstable/nonsensical
stuff).

> > Obviously you don't care about the code

> Bullshit.  If the code doesn't work

Check. Can't, due to basic design problems.

>                                      or is unstable

Check.

>                                                     or unmaintained

Has happened before with code from the same people. Can't even get them to
clean up for considering for inclusion. Check.

>                                                                     then
> everyone is concerned.

Yep.

>                         BUT THOSE ARE NOT THE ISSUES HERE.  Maybe Hans will
> be a little more sociable towards you when you guys start being a little
> more sociable towards him,

Sorry, the community has been sometimes abrasive, but on the whole helpful
and polite to newcomers. In this case they have been accused of everything,
including dishonesty... and this has been going on for the 4th round right
now.

>                            or maybe he's just a jerk and will never
change,

Looks that way. And /again/ there are people who tell nicely what would
have to happen to fix ReiserFS 4 to get it into shape.

> I don't know, and frankly I don't care, but R4 deserves its shot anyway
> based just on its potential alone.

And who will take over when the authors make for the woodwork, yet again?

>                                     Its reached the point where it can only
> get better with more *exposure*, and as I said in my response to Christoph,
> -mm is not the place to get exposure from a wider audience, due to its
> instability, even Andrew has said his -mm tree isn't meant to be a "stable"
> kernel series.

And what stops you from creating -rfs4 just for checking? If it /really/ is
so great, word will go round and people /will/ check it out.

> In the meantime, if a fork does happen, I'm going with the one that gives
> good ideas their chance at the mainstream no matter who the author is.  If
> you guys really want to kill the Linux success story, just keep right on
> putting your ego and personal feelings in front of what's good for the
> users and good for the success of Linux outside your elite club.

Addressed at the ReiserFS crowd? Sounds about right...

>                                                                   And
> before you tell yourself that the users don't matter, you'd better ask
> around among all the *other* developers here why *they* are working on
> Linux now, and not a BSD, or another fork of Linux.

A /very/ good question...

>                                                      Hint: many are
> employed by companies whose customer's are ... Linux *USERS*.  Linux's
> initial success was not pre-ordained or guaranteed, it was accomplished
> because a core group of people started WORKING TOGETHER with a common
> vision, if you now decide to forget what got you to this point, I
> GUARANTEE YOU that the success of your version of Linux will not
> continue.

And again, historically "Work towards /my/ vision", "Linux is doomed if you
don't do as I say", etc arguments go nowhere. Rightly so, they are usually
from people who don't have a clue. If you /really/ can do it /that/ much
better than Linus & Co, go ahead and show us.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                     Fono: +56 32 654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria              +56 32 654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile                Fax:  +56 32 797513

Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

[Miles Bader]

shevek@bur.st writes:
> As far as I'm concerned, commercial trolls have successfully taken away
> linux's only ever chance to sweep the field.
>
> It is now gone. OSX rocks harder than linux, the spotlight function is superb.

Speaking of trolls...

-Miles
-- 
Suburbia: where they tear out the trees and then name streets after them.