Re: [RFC] Btrfs mainline plans

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@kernel.org>]

On Fri, Oct 03, 2008 at 12:18:59AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:44:20 -0400 Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> > But, the code is very actively developed, and I believe the best way to
> > develop Btrfs from here is to get it into the mainline kernel (with a
> > large warning label about the disk format) and attract more extensive
> > review of both the disk format and underlying code.
> 
> For the record...  I have been encouraging Chris to get btrfs into
> mainline soon.  Get it into linux-next asap and merge it into 2.6.29.
> 
> And do this even though the on-disk format is still changing - we emit a
> loud printk at mount time and if someone comes to depend upon some
> intermediate format, well, that's their tough luck.
> 
> My thinking here is that btrfs probably has a future, and that an early
> merge will accelerate its development and will broaden its developer base. 
> If it ends up failing for some reason, well, we can just delete it
> again.
> 
> For various reasons this approach often isn't appropriate as a general
> policy thing, but I do think that Linux has needed a new local
> filesystem for some time, and btrfs might be The One, and hence is
> worth a bit of special-case treatment.

Let's try to learn from the past:

6 days from today ext4 (another new local filesystem for Linux) 
celebrates the second birthday of it's inclusion into Linus' tree
as a similar special-case.

You claim "an early merge will accelerate its development and will 
broaden its developer base" for Btrfs.

Read the timeline Ted outlined back in June 2006 for ext4 [1].
When comparing with what happened in reality it kinda disproves
your "acceleration" point.

cu
Adrian

[1] http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/6/28/454

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