Messages in this thread | | | From | "R. J. Wysocki" <> | Subject | Re: Collapse ext2 and 3 please | Date | Fri, 25 Jun 2004 22:52:47 +0200 |
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On Friday 25 of June 2004 20:41, Timothy Miller wrote: > Sean Neakums wrote: > > Timothy Miller <miller@techsource.com> writes: > >>Sean Neakums wrote: > >>>I seem to remember somebody, I think maybe Andrew Morton, suggesting > >>>that a no-journal mode be added to ext3 so that ext2 could be removed. > >>>I can't find the message in question right now, though. > >> > >>As an option, that might be nice, but if everyone were to start using > >>ext3 even for their non-journalled file systems, the ext2 code would > >>be subject to code rot. > > > > My paraphrase is at fault here. In the above, "removed" == "removed > > from the kernel tree". > > I understood that. > > Let me be more clear. I agree with other people's comments to the > effect that ext2 and ext3 have different goals and therefore different > and potentially incompatible optimizations. If ext3 had a mode that > made it equivalent to ext2, which encouraged people to only compile in > ext3 even for ext2 partitions (to save on kernel memory), then future > ext2 code bases would get less use and therefore less testing and > therefore more code rot. > > It is reasonable to allow the redundancy between ext2 and ext3 in order > to allow them to diverge. This kind of future-proofing mentality > underlies the reasons why kernel developers don't want to completely > stablize the module ABI, for example. >
Let me add my 2c, please.
I think that the most of users will use ext3 or reiserfs anyway, unless they actually _prefer_ ext2 for some reasons (let's face it: the most of users just follow the distribution defaults and the most of distributors set either ext3 or reiserfs as a default). This, however, confines the use of ext2 to a (relatively) small group of users having special needs and means that the future ext2 code will get less testing in any case, just like old device drivers do (eg. old CD-ROM drivers ;-)).
I'm not for collapsing the ext2 and ext3 code bases, but IMHO your argument does not apply.
I think that the good reason for keeping both ext* code bases in the kernel tree is that _there_ _are_ _some_ people who will need ext2 for some purposes, so why should we pull the carpet from under them?
Yours, rjw
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