better install experience

Szabolcs Szakacsits szaka at ntfs-3g.org
Thu Oct 11 12:51:27 UTC 2007


On 10/10/2007, Christopher Brown wrote:
>     On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 23:02 +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>
> >    There are two ntfs implementations. One is old, crufted, and poorly
> >    maintained.
>
> Sorry but that is bullshit. Old and crufted aren't very good technical 

As I mentioned previously, the kernel driver and ntfs-3g have the same 
source base. When I developed ntfs-3g then I noted the potentially serious 
problems in the kernel (e.g. in truncate). I also mentioned them to Dave 
Jones. I never got a reply for any of my emails. Recently a buffer overflow 
was discovered (Andrew Morton fixed it), driver hangs during logfile reset 
(maintainer made a patch).

It seems as the kernel evolves, the kernel NTFS driver isn't adjusted as 
Miklos Szeredi does for the FUSE kernel module, so the kernel side of the 
NTFS-3G driver can stay safe, deadlock and corruption free, no need to 
worry about it. He is also extremely responsive both design and 
troubleshooting discussions and quality coding wise. He is employed by 
Novell and allowed to work on FUSE in a certain amount of his work time.

> arguments and poorly maintained is simply untrue. 

The maintainer has been working for a non-Linux company since 2005 and from 
that point his open source contribution and leadership role is minimal. 
I've worked with him 4 years when it was decided finally a year ago that a 
partial fork is needed to ensure driver reliability and maintainability.

For example we (linux-ntfs team at that time) were reported that some ntfs 
utilities made Vista unbootable. The reason was found and fixed a year ago, 
still the official bugfix was released only 10 days ago. The serious fix 
was sitting in the CVS for a year.

Obviously everybody thinks differently what is "poorly maintained". For me 
the above is one sign, amongst several others.

> If this boils down to "It doesn't have write support, bwaaaaaaaah" then 
> "poorly maintained" isn't much of one either. The reason there have been 
> so few git commits is because it works fine in the state that its in and 
> as I explained, the core developer is focused mainly on the new driver 
> which, license debates aside, will be released in about a year.

In 2005, we were offered NTFS code in favour of letting a company use and 
dual licence what we have developed. Then it became 2006 then the story 
changed a bit then the date was 2007 and then 2008.

>     Dave asked me for my opinion, and I said that we shouldn't ship
>     something that's not recommended by one of its authors, and has no 
>     real maintenance upstream:
>
>     http://ntfs-3g.org/about.html
>
> You're taking that from Szaka's mouth

Please rephrase it better and I'll happily update the page if you're right. 
As long as it's correct, I really don't care how the info is on the page.

> who spat the dummy and went off and created ntfs-3g when he could have 
> merged it with ntfsprogs.

Here is my original announcement:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=Pine.LNX.4.21.0607141859080.31588-100000%40mlf.linux.rulez.org

I did the work as a long time Linux-NTFS project member. There wasn't 
__anything__ to merge. The work itself was Linux-NTFS, so in fact I __did__ 
merge it when I published it. The code could have been just used without 
any change. I was the only one working on write support and there wasn't 
really anything to merge with because they were already included.

After two-three months later the project still wasn't going the way it 
should have hereby the fork was made. 

> It actually has nothing to do with the kernel driver.

As I wrote, it has quite a lot, in fact.

	Szaka

--
NTFS-3G Lead Developer:  http://ntfs-3g.org




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