Mike Benoit wrote:
Just like many other applications that support plugins/extensions/addons
( like Firefox, Thunderbird, Azureus ) I would be incredibly surprised
if Reiser4 doesn't spawn a large community of people completely
independent of Namesys that create plugins from the useless, to the
amazingly useful for years to come.
You would hope. The problem is, most of the ideas we have for
amazing/useless/practical plugins have already been done as specialized
filesystems in FUSE. What's more, FUSE doesn't usually require root
privileges to run, causing some people to do such useless things as
support for various filesystems already in the kernel (so you can
loop-mount filesystems without using the loop device or having root
privileges).
Although, there is one other thing to consider -- NTFS in the kernel has
stagnated for something like 10 years without write support, while
userspace tools like ntfsck and resize_ntfs, using libntfs, have
actually gotten relatively stable at dealing with all kinds of ntfs
oddities. For awhile, we had captive-ntfs (also done in FUSE), but more
recently, someone wrote a FUSE driver for libntfs, making the first
reasonably stable fully featured read/write NTFS driver for Linux.
It's also reasonably fast, sometimes faster than ext2/3, I'm told.
The big advantage of that is, FUSE is easier to deal with than the
kernel, and userland daemons can crash, but if something in the kernel
crashes, there goes your OS.
Also, userland just has more options. Some FUSE drivers are written in
Perl, others in Ruby.
I realize there are some things that are really better done in the
kernel, like crypto/compression support, and Reiser4 will support things
that FUSE currently doesn't do very well. But if we're to pull any
filesystem hackers away from FUSE, we need to provide as good or better
an API, both in-kernel, and for userspace daemons.
