On Sat, 16 Oct 1999, Kragen Sitaker wrote:
Hi all userfs fans!
> David Summers writes:
> > Would anyone be interested if a UserFS CVS repository were set up?
> >
> > From watching other projects, it seems that such a repository might help
> > consolidate some of the patches and help the UserFS developers coordinate.
> > Maybe a web page could be set up and/or a bug page (bugzilla?) and a
> > UserFS file system directory set up?
> >
> > Comments, Suggestions, Good points, Bad points?
> >
> > With some further discussion, I might be willing to set up such a CVS
> > repository and maybe a web server if someone would maintain it and/or help
> > me (much help) maintain it.
>
> What we need is not a CVS repository. What we need is a maintainer.
> CVS doesn't consolidate patches automatically, although it does help
> with the scut-work of keeping track of changes. Consolidating patches
> and coordinating have to be done by people, and they are hard work.
Yes. That's the point. I do agree, the CVS repository is very useful thing
and I'm glad to hear that someone would like to host it. And I do agree,
that userfs _needs_ a maintainer.
The problem is, that userfs is not going to go into the main stream of
kernel and it means, that a lot of people is not using it anymore.
What userfs brings to us? The possibility of writing user-space device
drivers, user-space filesystems. It is an interface between VFS functions
and our specific user-space implementations. The problem is, that in the
current kernels, there already is such an interface - CODA. The original
purpose is of course much more versatile (a distributed file system), but
when I want to write a user-space filesystems (e.g. mailfs, ftpfs, httpfs,
tarfs, etc.), it's good enough, though it's not so powerful as userfs.
I like the idea of userfs, though I'm not a friend of C++. I'll spend some
time on looking at the Marc's work and then if nobody else will want to do
the job of the maintainer, I could perhaps do it some time.
With greetings,
Jim
.~. Jan Jirmásek
/V\ jim(at)penguin.cz, http://www.penguin.cz/~jim
// \\
/( )\ Linux, the choice of a GNU generation.
^^-^^
