[GTALUG] From BTRFS to what?

[Christopher Browne]

On 5 September 2017 at 18:33, Anthony de Boer via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> (Mind you, a few Reiserfs systems a late co-worker set up _did_ get
> repaved proactively after one or two shat themselves.  But that's the
> only FS that I've seen being actively bad.)
>
> I should add that the most solid thing I've used was ZFS, but that was
> on another OS; I haven't had occasion to look hard at ZoL yet.

I never had any failures with Reiserfs, but was careful to choose things
I could afford to lose ;-)

Until the tale headed down the homicidal path, the disagreements
didn't seem to be all that vital.

There were a number of entertaining choices in Reiserfs, notably
off-the-wall being the choice not to have inodes.  There was enough
odd that it shouldn't have come as any surprise that the "regular
kernel community" didn't head out like lemmings, off to leap cliffs,
to adopt every aspect instantaneously.

The fact that the project was trying out different things with a view
to seeing what *could* be changed seemed mighty useful.  There
were good collegial debates at the time.  I recall some fun bits
trying to figure out how you'd attach extended attributes in a
useful way (hint: it's not particularly easy, because people
are accustomed to using tar to capture filesystems, and you'd
need to change tar somewhat substantially to be EA-aware).

None of it seemed to be nasty the way that things got surrounding,
oh, say, Net-vs-Open-BSD, or the qmail-vs-zmail debates, where
there were some strong-willed personalities that couldn't
coexist on the same project.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"