>>> On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 9:54 PM, in message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Erik N Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: -snip- > I would therefor encourage people to choose file systems based on > their relative merits, rather than concerns over continued > development.
By and large, I agree with what you said. Open Source software can have a life long after the original developer(s) have stopped developing it. In this case, however, reality intrudes. One of the major reasons the openSUSE project made EXT3 their default file system was because they were themselves concerned about the future development of reiserfs. This was before any hint of legal trouble had arisen. The fact of the matter is, not very many people are currently hacking on reiserfs, and not very many people are interested in starting. For companies that commit themselves to support what they ship, that's a big issue. If there's not enough experienced talent to maintain it properly, you don't want it to be your default. As a result, SLE11 will also have EXT3 as the default file system. Reiserfs will continue to be shipped and supported, but you'll have to manually select it during the install to get it. When you add in the recent legal events, continuing to create _new_ systems with reiserfs is a major concern for businesses. One which is easily avoidable by switching to EXT3 now for new builds, before it becomes the default. There have been technical issues as well, and not too far in the past. When Linux for the mainframe first came out, reiserfs was not big-endian safe (and I'm not sure about 64-bit safe). Even after that was corrected, Adam Thornton had at least once instance where reiserfs ate his data on a system under heavy load. All in all, enough to make someone running a business to worry. Given the nature of what this email contains, I feel compelled to give the standard disclaimers here. Speaking only for myself, not Novell, etc. Mark Post ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
