If Gentoo can die off, ReiserFS is doomed (was Re: Reiser FS or ext3?)

[Leo Mauler]

--- On Sat, 9/27/08, Jeffrey Watts <jeffrey.w.watts at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 6:50 PM, Leo Mauler
> <webgiant at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> > Actually they haven't been supporting ReiserFS. 
> > They've been paying Reiser's company, Namesys, 
> > for ReiserFS support, but with Hans Reiser in
> > prison (thanks to all the "gossipy
> > details"), thats ended.
> 
> I don't think you're making a fundamental mistake
> here.  Not all distributions are the same.
> 
> Gentoo is a ricer's OS.  Folks who use it like to tweak
> systems and learn stuff, and maybe put some bitchin' 
> neon ground effects on it and a killer stereo.  SuSE is 
> a professional company that sells guaranteed products.
> 
> If some part of Gentoo doesn't work well, well then
> tough cookies there Johnny Rocket.  Your mileage may 
> vary.  No warranty.  No refunds.
> 
> SuSE guarantees their product.  If a supported version of
> SuSE supports ReiserFS, then the company will support it 
> to the best of their ability.

Which won't be much now that Namesys' support has stalled.  SuSE has been encouraging users to use Ext3 over ReiserFS for some time now, for quite a number of very good reasons, starting well before the Hans Reiser incarceration.

Someone probably came into the SuSE boardroom and said something like "REISERFS IS DYING BECAUSE IT'S NO LONGER A GOOD TECHNOLOGY.  YOU
OUGHT TO CONSIDER MOVING TO A NEWER TECHNOLOGY.  I HEAR THERE IS THIS THING OUT THERE CALLED 'EXT3'."

After all, ReiserFS has a lot of technical problems, and Reiser4 will likely never see the light of day.  Technology which is no longer good must be dropped, Jeffrey Watts, as you told me over and over a few months ago.  Nevermind if some people still use it, clearly they are idiots who must be re-educated into using a filesystem which, for example, isn't still dependent on the BKL and thus unable to scale well due to only using one core at a time of a multi-core processor.  Or won't get confused during a fsck and make a corrupted filesystem into an even more corrupted filesystem.  Or won't see a ReiserFS disk image on a ReiserFS filesystem and get confused as to which disk contents (filesystem or image) are the right ones to recover.

Reformatting a ReiserFS filesystem can sometimes result in data files from the previous contents reappearing on the now allegedly-wiped hard drive, a detail which folks interested in tax breaks for donating old machines, while simultaneously protecting their corporate secrets, would be dismayed to learn.

Meanwhile, Ext3 now has all of ReiserFS's features, very few of its problems, and a few features not present in ReiserFS (such as XIP).

I've deleted the rest of your crap (where you try to bait me into talking more about Hans Reiser's difficulties), which was irrelevant to the point that SuSE had already decided to stop using ReiserFS as its default filesystem before the Hans Reiser incarceration, due to ReiserFS' technical problems and the cost of getting all its ReiserFS support from Namesys.  If you want to go on discussing a dead issue, be my guest, you seem to have developed an enjoyment of that sort of thing.