Grant Edwards wrote:
On 2012-10-25, Kerin Millar<kerfra...@fastmail.co.uk> wrote:
The comment you linked to was fairly bereft of technical content,
That "comment" was from _Ted_Ts'o_ for pete's sake.
I don't care it was from the heavens upon high. The only remark that was
meaningful in a technical sense was the thoroughly inconclusive
"Update", suggesting (but not establishing) that it might be related to
certain combinations of mount options. The rest was just hand-waving
about how it couldn't be a big deal because, if it was, "lots of people
would have been complaining", which is denying the antecedent.
Let's separate two fundamental issues here. One issue is that of data
corruption, which is a big deal. I'm sure most of us would agree on that
point. That such an issue is going to generate news - and no small
degree of discussion - is a given. People will want to know what the
problem is and what they can do about it in order to be safe. What did
Ted expect?
The second issue is that of the scope of the bug. This is where I took
issue with the comment. The overall meaning of his comment could be
interpreted as "Your collective concerns are overblown because the scope
of this bug is minimal. Oh, and I think it may have something to do with
these mount options which, being esoteric, nobody in their right mind
would be using anyway so, hey, big deal."
The fact of the matter is that the investigation, even as I write this,
is ongoing and no patch has been produced. Consider that for a moment.
It doesn't matter how brilliant Ted is, or that you have seen fit to
sample his mucus. Telling us all that we should be unconcerned because
the scope is minimal *before* he and his peers have completed their
investigation and a line been drawn under the affair was simply premature.
That the bug reporter has since demonstrated that the corruption can
occur in kernel versions that don't include commit eeecef0af5 - kernels
which we were previously told were not affected - only serves to
demonstrate this point.
--Kerin
