On Thu, 21 Aug 2003, Manoj Joseph wrote: > > Wrong approach. > Why? I am not doing a ntfs file system driver for linux.
AFAIR, you mentioned it helps Win -> Linux migration. If you migrate, then you want to solve issues in the new, native environment, not escaping and working around. Fix the cause, not the symptom. However your tool can be a very valuable one for Linux -> Win migrants, so asking Microsft to including it seems quite reasonable, soon ;) Moreover as others also pointed out, there are several such tools. I know, yours is in kernel space and better, etc, but it's still the "not invented here" category, no real innovation, value in my opinion (you asked for it ;) > > Lack of the NTFS information? > The fact that the NTFS file system is not documented *is* a > major factor. It's a myth, this is why I also mentioned it before. It took me about one month in my limited free time to go through the current, public NTFS docs and sources and write ntfsresize and fix/help to fix all known problems in the version 2 NTFS driver (what most distros ship). Anton Altaparmakov, the driver maintainer, says, the problem [to implement _full_ write support] is the lack of time, not lack of public knowledge. But don't believe us [linux-ntfs developers], just think it over. If you have the knowledge how to read, sure you also know who to write those on-disk data [there might be technologies where this is not true, but it's not NTFS]. However NTFS is pretty complex and write support is at least 10x harder to implement than read support due to e.g. carefully handling concurrency issues. > > The reason is nobody has the time to do it. > I don't think so. I definitely know, I don't have time. Anton says he also doesn't have time (doing his PH.D). I believe this because it happens he ignores my patches, no regular releases, announcements or real activity. Flatcap, another developer and the webmaster, also doesn't have time, ignores emails or can respond only weeks later, web site is pretty outdated, etc. Rarely people ask what they could help, they are told then they are gone without reappearing again. So at present Linux NTFS develpment is pretty in "stalled", maintaince mode, for half, one year (e.g. I wrote the ntfs resizer over 1 year ago, it just recently started to be known, thanks to Mandrake). > > ...Your effort would be MUCH MORE appreciated there, by > > millions of users. > :) I'm not joking :) See e.g. the statistics of the Linux-NTFS project (the lines at the right is down because those data are for this, not an entire month) http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/index.php?report=months&group_id=13956 Over 2,300,000 page views. Goggle stats says, every month there are 1-2% more NT based OS (NTFS) than Win9* one (FAT). FAT has volume and file size limits and several other drawbacks and soon will go away except for special purposes. Szaka
