reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again

shevek_at_bur.st
Date: 06/30/05

  • Next message: Rik Van Riel: "Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again" 
    Date:	Thu, 30 Jun 2005 22:26:12 +1000
To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org

    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

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  • Next message: Rik Van Riel: "Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again"

    Relevant Pages

    • Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again
      ... problem is that the "filesystem" in and of itself is where data is kept. ... OSX rocks harder than linux, ... > * reiser4 can't be included until it has had widespread testing. ... send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in ...
      (Linux-Kernel)
    • Re: reiser4 plugins
      ... But the fact that reiser4 ... One filesystem that exists right now. ... takes so much work to convert existing curses apps to GTK? ... Linux over POSIX, I think. ...
      (Linux-Kernel)
    • Re: reiser4 vs politics: linux misses out again
      ... OSX rocks harder than linux, ... And that's if they choose to support them, ... > developers would have bent over backwards to get this as the primary filesystem ... it should be trivial to fix reiser4 so that directories don't ...
      (Linux-Kernel)
    • Re: reiser4 plugins
      ... But the fact that reiser4 ... > semantics + trivial shell scripting enables, as illustrated by David, ... All for use on /one/ non-standard filesystem. ... what strange extension to force onto Linus' kernel version. ...
      (Linux-Kernel)
    • Re: I request inclusion of reiser4 in the mainline kernel
      ... >thankless) work of reviewing code for free. ... qualified to work on our filesystem. ... Reiser4 is far from perfect, but it is ready for more users. ... marked as deprecated as soon as V4 has passed mass testing. ...
      (Linux-Kernel)