[GTALUG] From BTRFS to what?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Dhaval Giani via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| Redhat was never a major contributor to btrfs. The folks who are on btrfs
| like it and will continue fund its development. We might see a btrfs v2
| similar to ext3 and ext4. But only time will tell. Please let's not equate
| red hat with upstream kernel development. There are a lot of us who are
| unrelated to red hat doing it as well.

I agree with all that.  However...

I use RedHat distros.  I use RedHat as my quality control.  Generally
I have to seriously disagree with them to go to the bother of using
something that they intentionally don't support.

I've only used BTRFS by accident (I installed Fedora and somehow got
it).  It was not a problem.  So I have no actual technical complaint
about BTRFS.

Here are the strikes against it:

- it has taken way too long to be technically mature (at least I've
  inferred this)

- long time-to-develop suggests complexity.  Complexity is a really
  bad thing if you want reliability.

- I'm *very* conservative about filesystems.  When they go wrong they
  can cause long-term consequences.

- my distros of choice no longer support BTRFS.  That's much more
  negative than "don't yet support".  It's a really big deal when
  RHEL drops something, especially in a point release.

- BTRFS looks to have a big fat niche and yet it has failed to fill
  it.  Perhaps it has even blocked others from entering that niche.

I'd love BTRFS to be developed and prove the nay-sayers (like me)
wrong.  It does a bunch of things we could really use.