reiser4

[Dave Jones]

On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 12:39:39AM +0300, Razvan Corneliu C.R. d3vi1 VILT wrote:
 
 > It means that it's not an impossible task. If there are
 > bugs in it and the vanilla kernel doesn't fix them, but the SuSE kernel
 > does, is it a shame in taking the patches from their .src.rpm? I should
 > hope not.

Nice idea. There are a bunch of problems however.
- SuSE kernel's and Fedora kernel's have a different methodology.
  SuSE still do the 'take a snapshot, add lots of patches' approach,
  Fedora constantly tracks upstream. This means that patches may not
  even apply without considerable work munging them.
- SuSE don't always put explanations into their patches.
  Which means someone has to sit down and actually work out what
  they do sometimes.
- In some cases, their patches are only relevant to the SuSE kernel tree
  do to some other patches they have merged.
- With such a large number of patches in their tree, it would easily be
  a fulltime job tracking it looking for useful bits.
- It still requires we have at least one person with a deep understanding
  of how that filesystem works.  By adopting reiserfs as their defacto
  filesystem, SuSE have folks that spend 99% of their time just hacking
  reiserfs. Red Hat choosing ext* as its defacto filesystem has quite a
  few folks who know those particular filesystems backwards.

Time would be better spent trying to convince them to push their fixes
back upstream. In fairness, they have been much better at this in recent
times than they had in the past.

		Dave