On Sat, 2007-05-19 at 22:40 +0200, Jaroslaw Swierczynski wrote: > I'm not sure whether this was discussed before (I mean recently, it > might have been brought up a long time ago but a lot has changed > since). > > Althought reiser4 still has not accepted by Linus, it seems it's > fairly stable and very popular. I've just had a look at the reiser4 > patch [1] and it seems it does not modify the kernel in a way which > could disrupt its normal opration. Mostly it's symbols exporting, only > the code fs/fs-writeback.c is actually modified but in my view those > changes does not affect the original behaviour of the kernel. > > You have to admit that Arch's kernel package has many more complex > patches. I'm not saying that we should add reiser4 support to the > installer etc. Just make users life easier, save their time. If I'm > right (and I might not since I'm obviously not a kernel hacker) > inclusion of reiser4 wouldn't drop stability of the kernel nor affect > any other subsystem. > > Opinions? > > 1. > ftp://ftp.namesys.com/pub/reiser4-for-2.6/2.6.21/reiser4-for-2.6.21.patch.gz
I looked through the patchset, for the kernel it doesn't do so much special things. It adds an extra exported symbol, so what? The function that is touched is nicely changed, for non-reiser4 filesystems it still does the same as it used to do. For the kernel, I don't see much downsides on including it, other than that we'll get bugreports about users ricing up their system because of a filesystem that hasn't had enough testing (reiser3 wasn't so stable when using kernels older than 2.4.18 for example, while it was included in the early 2.4 series and there was even a 2.2.20 backport for it). Keep in mind that reiser4 is a new filesystem, written from scratch, while the others we have are either filesystems that are ported from other operating systems (JFS, XFS), or had years of testing (ext2, ext3). The problem with this patch is that there's more than just a kernel: - a patched grub - reiser4progs I don't worry about the reiser4progs, they're just some tools just like e2fsprogs and xfsprogs. What worries me more is grub. When I tried reiser4 a long while ago, the grub patch didn't apply on our version of grub. Having grub fucked up by some weird patch is not what we want. Grub is not the cleanest piece of software and I certainly don't like hacking around with it. _______________________________________________ arch mailing list [email protected] http://archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch
