Why do people keep bringing up drama?
The community infighting has sucked, but that's a thing that matters primarily for maintainers.
I think most users just want something that works.
Why do people keep bringing up drama?
The community infighting has sucked, but that's a thing that matters primarily for maintainers.
I think most users just want something that works.
drama matters because most users don't want to have their favourite FS randomly removed from the kernel unexpectedly after some OS update :)
That said I certainly hope that one day the technical advantage of bcachefs will be so overwhelming that maybe the decision to remove it will be overturned. And if big vendors make it their default FS the bus factor will disappear (even if unofficially you'd still be the sole maintainer, but no one cares about that in the enterprise world...)
> most users don't want to have their favourite FS randomly removed from the kernel
True. But when you look at this, isn't the deeper problem that Linux remains such a monolith, and there's a stark difference between "included" and "not included" in the kernel. It's now over 35 years old. The fact that we can't have stable APIs and develop more out-of-tree drivers is not a strength, it's a weakness.
Even old Unix systems like SVR4 managed to have stable, public driver interfaces, despite being rather proprietary. FreeBSD manages to have drivers in its ports tree, with a stable API for a given major version. What makes Linux so special that it can't manage this?
I understand all of the arguments about why this has to be so. But... they might have made sense in the early days, but after 35 years it screams of immaturity. Plenty of other systems, including other open source systems, manage to do this, including having versioned interfaces so things aren't set in stone. Linux remains right at the extreme end of guaranteeing nothing. I've long thought this was unnecessary and counterproductive.
I don't care about the drama, I just want to say thank you for your continued work to advance the state of the art in open file systems.
Appreciate it :)
Related username?
To answer the original question, most people who care about their filesystem at all care about its stability. Not just "does it work now" but also "will it work and improve over time". Infighting puts the future at risk.
It really does.
But you might want to check out the bus factor on btrfs too; when a maintainer says "but we've saved Facebook billions and billions of dollars!", calls for the other filesystem maintainer to be ejected from the community, then quits to join Anthropic a month later - that's not a vote of confidence.
I'd be very happy if people could just stop bringing up drama and us factors. We put it behind us a year ago, but it seems not everyone got the memo.
Checking the bus factor:
Btrfs regulars:
- 1 from Meta
- 1 from Oracle
- 4 from SuSe
- 2 from WDC
bcachefs:
- Kent Overstreet
Might end in a new bcachefs fork beeing included back into mainline. If companies sponsor a few fulltime devs working on the new fork, we finally might have a stable enterprise ready CoW filesystem.