Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 164699
Fedora Core is ReiserFS Hostile
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:10 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Description of problem: Isn't it time that Fedora stop treating the Reiser Filesystem like a bastard step child? Reiser has been out for 5 years, solid as a rock, and is the default installation in other Linux disributions. Yet RedHat is openly hostile to this file system making you type in special startup command to attempt to install it and then Fedora has many bugs related to ReiserFS that are caused, I believe, through poor Reiser testing. None of the Reiser related bugs are the fault of the Reiser Filesystem. In actively excluding Reiser you send a message to the Linux community that RedHat is out of touch with reality and it calls into question if clear thinking is involved in the design process. I am an old time RedHat user whoused to actually pay for it when it was reasonably priced. I find the attitude to Reiser offensive and it makes me feel like I can't fully embrace Fedora as a community member. It reduces community support from people like me who would otherwise put more effort into Fedora specifically. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install Fedora 2. 3. Additional info:
Are you volunteering to maintain the needed reiser patches to the kernel and associated tools? RedHat doesn't have infinite engineering resources and they must prioritize how they allocate the resources. While you may disagree with how RedHat is choosing to prioritize resource you have to come to terms with the fact that resources are limited and RedHat has chosen to support ext3 primarily. Demanding RedHat re-prioritize resources is not going to get you very far. What wlll get you further, is stepping up and proving that community contributors, like yourself, are able to make the commitment to maintain alternative filesystems. Please read: http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Wishlist Yes reiser on Fedora could use much more testing.. but there must be manpower to do that testing and more importantly more manpower to maintaining rieser specific patches and driving patches back upstream. The only way reiser is going to see better support is if a strong community supporter of rieser steps forward and shows fedora core developers they are dedicated to bringing reiser inline with the other distribution features. Are you that person? -jef
If I say yes will you change your position on ReiserFS?
I have a position? You can say whatever you like... the important thing is showing through action that someone in the community is committed to fixing the bugs and make reiser work correftly with things such as selinux. Everyone knows that there is a segment of the community that desires better reiser support... but until people come forward and show they are committed to making it work better the situation isn't going to change. It takes more than desire.. it takes someone who can make the commitment and can deal with the software problems. People in the community worked to get ppc and x86_64 releases out by showing they were committed to fixing problems over the long term... its a matter of showing up and starting to work on the problems instead of demanding others work on it. -jef
We aren't going to come forward if we are wasting our time. We would rather work with other Linux distros that are not Reiser hostile like Novell. All I'm getting from Fedora/Redhat are lame excuses about why not. So - I want to hear YES to this question: If we can provide the community support, will you embrace Reiser? I want you to commit to not wasting people's time if we do the work and you have no intention of including it. What I'm hearing and seeing is that Redhat is pushing Ext3 and is hostile to other file systems. I want you to confirm that is not the case.
I have some ideas about this. Let's move this discussion to a mailing list. Bugzilla is not an appropriate forum.
the kernel has it built, this isn't a kernel issue. "community support" isn't the answer. The problem is that even its upstream maintainers don't spend a great deal of time on v3 issues, devoting their time to their v4 efforts instead. As a result of this, it lacked things like SELinux support for a long time after ext3 had support for EA's. Community support isn't going to fix that. It needs people familiar with the code, and as its a complicated filesystem, there aren't a lot of those about. For reasons like this, I can completely understand why the installer team don't offer installation on that media by default. Because when it breaks, people won't take "Tell upstream to implement functionality y" kindly, it's percieved as a Fedora problem, and frankly, we have more important issues to worry about. Finally, maintaining reiserfs patches in the Fedora kernel is the wrong way to go, if it needs fixing, fix it upstream.
So - why is this a problem for redhat and not a problem for other distributions that embrace reiser?