Re: I request inclusion of reiser4 in the mainline kernel

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[CC list trimmed to relevant people, no need to spam Linus' and Andrew's mailboxes, they have enough to do as it is]

On Sep 16, 2005, at 15:39:48, Hans Reiser wrote:
Christoph Hellwig wrote:
additinoal comment is that the code is very messy, very different
from normal kernel style, full of indirections and thus hard to read.

Most of my customers remark that Namesys code is head and shoulders
above the rest of the kernel code.  So yes, it is different.

And yet thousands and thousands of people, businesses, etc, say that the Linux kernel code is miles above all the commercial software out there. Please leave the worthless rhetoric out of a technical discussion. The issue stands that in many ways the Reiser4 code does not exactly follow Documentation/CodingStyle and does not match most of the rest of the kernel, making it hard to read for other kernel developers. If you were just doing this forever as an external kernel patch, nobody would give a damn. On the other hand, you're trying to get it included in the upstream kernel, which means that those same "other kernel developers" for whom it is hard to read may be expected to maintain it until the end of time. Given this, it seems perfectly reasonable to ask that it be cleaned up.

In particular, they cite the XFS code as being so incredibly hard to read that its unreadability is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in license fees for me.

How does XFS have _anything_ to do with Reiser4? A technical discussion is no place for political pissing contest.

[more useless posturing snipped]

As for the indirections, if you figure out how to make VFS indirections easy to follow, the same technique should be applicable to Reiser4, and I will be happy to fix it.

That's not his responsibility, it's _yours_. If you want your stuff included in the the kernel, you need to make sure it is sufficiently acceptable. Besides, this is just one complaint of the many he made. This may not be particularly solvable, but there are a number of other points he made that you guys need to try to resolve.

(Note for the record: I actually think XFS acceptance was delayed too long, and I think that XFS is a great filesystem, but a rhetorical point needed to be made......)

See above. Rhetoric has little or no place here. Such comments are why Reiser4 typically triggers massive flamewars when it is mentioned on the LKML.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett

--
Somone asked me why I work on this free (http://www.fsf.org/ philosophy/) software stuff and not get a real job. Charles Shultz had the best answer:

"Why do musicians compose symphonies and poets write poems? They do it because life wouldn't have any meaning for them if they didn't. That's why I draw cartoons. It's my life."
  -- Charles Shultz


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