> Another way to consider this would be that we can stop arguing against these > changes, let the GNOME folks run the ship aground, and hope that the user > backlash will act as a wakeup call when it comes to these changes. I agree > that btrfs is far too unstable to be made a default, and I also agree that > ZFS > would be a much better option. However, there is always going to be pushback > on ZFS. If you want the best, there's a price to pay, and that's licensing > headaches in this case.
I understand you but I'd like to help btrfs guys to get their stuff working. And for two days now I've tried to write a reasonable honest truthful reply for their questions backed by facts and confirmed data unable to come up with concise answers. After following this topic it became clear to me that I'm not sufficiently prepared to give a proper technical presentation of my issues or to have an in-depth discussion of btrfs while they are very well prepared to defend their position. This is happening so suddenly too. I didn't expect Fedora to start considering this at all because Red Hat isn't at least publicly discussing it. I'd also like to avoid writing massive dozen page emails about my personal issues with btrfs when the central question here is if btrfs is good enough for majority of Fedora's user base. It could be even if it isn't ready for my use. I can only offer descriptions of symptoms of trouble from the web back-end developer / desktop end-user PoW which starts to appear in personal computers where I have used or currently do use btrfs if not full-time. I made a long list of these yesterday and only some of them can be linked to existing known issues which are yet to be fixed so I didn't send that list to Chris Murphy and Stasiek Michalski yet and might not do so. Not publicly at least. Some of the issues have been fixed but not yet present in openSUSE Leap 15.1 where I previously experienced just how broken btrfs can be at its worst and I don't have that particular setup right now to even test if these changes would aid me in upcoming openSUSE Leap 15.2 release. I just have to let my head cool down before trying btrfs full-time again in a year or two. Furthermore some of the things the proponents of this change have written just throw me back into my chair because after all I've gone through with btrfs and after all the lost time I could have spent better producing code, I know what they're writing is simply not true. Or not true in my case and I have major disbelief regarding for example there being no need to run btrfs balance when on my ThinkPad T430 I know for a fact that btrfs constantly will start running out of disk space and the solutions to it only temporarily solve it through regular use of btrfs balance, disabling snapshots which tend to get corrupted anyway and fine tuning the file system. But then again I don't think they're lying and I don't want to accuse them of that. There are visibly big gaps in how btrfs is experienced by different people in different working environments on different hardware. Based on what I've read lately, btrfs seems to work at really big scales very well. Where it fails to work are smaller individual setups and small businesses. This makes it a controversial file system. Like I explained in another message, btrfs to me is highly visible file system and a source of stress as I have to eventually babysit it which to me proves it is unstable and not production ready. And this variation in how btrfs is experienced by different people is perhaps just another sign of it not being production ready yet even if huge progress has been made recent times. That is a good reason not to make it the default choice in Fedora. Yesterday I went through my past emails where I discuss btrfs with my colleagues. It was some years ago but I had a similar freezing issues back then as well as I had in 2019 and when asked about it btrfs supporters explained to me that my particular workload which involves collection of hundreds if not up to a thousand small C, Ruby, Python, PHP and C# files, hundred GBs of image data split into maybe approximately 1MB files, and a two large local databases is "poison to btrfs" to quote a friend of mine. It was recommended that I run JFS instead which I've yet to touch but now that I have time I should try it as well as other available options. I'm highly interested of testing nilfs and bcachefs right now. Furthermore even if Fedora were to set the btrfs as a default, I wouldn't use it in my main PCs since btrfs doesn't enjoy my trust at all right now. However I would stop recommending Fedora to my friends and family because doing a custom partitioning in Anaconda using another file system is way too complex and difficult task to perform. It's much easier to just recommend Ubuntu or openSUSE where the partitioning using alternative file system is much much easier and clear cut operation to do. If it was easy to choose e.g. plain lvm+ext4 or Stratis lvm+xfs instead of btrfs during Fedora installation like it is in openSUSE I probably wouldn't be in total opposition to this proposal. I still would be against it but I wouldn't be here writing these messages about this issue and expressing my opposition to this proposal. And it would have to be fixed first before making btrfs the default file system. The zfs in my opinion isn't a perfect choice neither technologically or legally. However it is the best thing out there for people who want an usable production-ready advanced file system right now. The issues with zfs to me present themselves as easier to solve than the problems with btrfs. But I'm not a legal expert and it really is a shame that the licensing is an issue with zfs. It's a very good file system and it didn't need to be forcefully pushed to become a success story. This is opposite to btrfs since its proponents constantly seem to want forcibly push it to people who don't want it. That combined with its continued technical issues have turned my initial positive enthusiasm towards btrfs into a very deep skepticism of it and its promised capabilities. I wouldn't count for there being a backlash. Usually Fedora users are very open to changes and used to living "near edge". If it is already been decided to make the btrfs the default and this is merely a formality then I'm hoping for the best case that they know what they're doing and that btrfs' very latest version is usable for long periods of time and works through several upgrade cycles without reformat even if last year it wasn't yet on openSUSE Leap 15.1 release for myself. > In the end, it doesn't really matter what we say. All of the arguments in > this > thread are likely to be ignored by FESCo, as they have in other recent change > "proposals" (more like change announcements, in this case). So, perhaps we > should just watch this fail, and use that failure to push a sane default in > the next release. Quite contrary, I have hopes that my opinion does matter like it did in the past with the questions about systemd and pulseaudio. At least I hope btrfs becoming the default can be delayed enough to ensure that if large number of problems do start to appear, people have at least an easy alternative, or "safety net" if you will, to choose during the Fedora install. Anaconda should be changed to allow an easy alternative to btrfs be chosen even if it is the initial proposed partitioning scheme for users. The btrfs change shouldn't come as a surprise for users who don't read the change logs either. I deeply care about Fedora and don't wish to see any kind of "riot". Especially if it is completely avoidable with some preparations. _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
