Re: (reiserfs) Re: New Linux 2.5 - 2.6 TODO (Alan Cox suggestsdelaying

From: Hans Reiser (hans@reiser.to)
Date: Sat Jun 17 2000 - 07:40:15 EST


There is a guy who wrote an online resizer for ext2. I have no idea whether it
is good or trash.
He has been trying to get it into the kernel since early or mid 2.3. Alan Cox
is being quite helpful to the guy. The problem is that the reasonable thing to
do is to have one of the ext2 maintainers review his code and verify that they
are comfortable with it and it is good code. Why is this a problem? Well it
seems that the maintainers are busy with attending conferences and their own
code right now. They have been busy like this for more than 6 months, and as a
result this rather useful sounding functionality is very likely to miss 2.4.
They haven't any idea whether it is good code or not, they haven't bothered to
read it for 6 months.

I find this incredible personally.

Here is some poor guy who has put in the rather substantial labor required to
write an online resizer, and his code is just going to waste and there is
nothing he can do about it. He has even spent time rewriting the code to
minimize the kernel portion of it so that these other guys will have less to
read. It wasn't enough.

This is something shameful.

Now you guys can go ahead and hate me all you want for holding up a mirror to
your faces, but I say that as a community there are areas we need to improve.

The guy who wrote that ext2 online resizer probably won't approve of this email
I am writing, so don't blame him for it.

Hans

PS

Alan, if you cannot find anybody better for the task, I can assign one of my
guys (the reiserfs resizer guy) to reviewing this code in detail. Obviously it
would be better if one of the ext2 guys did this, and I hope you all appreciate
that I have no personal incentive other than decency for doing this.

I suggest we let the reiserfs portion of this thread die, it has all been said.
I could go into a detailed discussion of your points Chris, but I'd rather ask
you how the postgresql bug is going.

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