Slashdot Mirror
The File-System Fallout of the Reiser Verdict
perlow writes "Yesterday, the Open Source community took an emotional hit when veteran Linux programmer Hans Reiser was convicted of first degree murder in the suspicious disappearing of his wife, Nina. While I won't go into the details of the case, as this has been covered extensively in the press, I would like to talk a little bit about how this verdict will impact the technology in play for file system dominance in our favorite Open Source operating system, Linux."
that maybe control of ReiserFS will now be in the hands of someone who is not a total cock... sorry, a wife-murdering total cock. Hans Reiser's ability ot play nice with others made you long for Theo de Raadt's sunny demeanor. Given that the code is Free, having it under the control of someone who is not a complete sociopath can't help but the increase uptake of the novel parts of the ReiserFS structure.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
25 years of coding in prison might yield some significant product. You can put him away physically, but I think we should still let his brilliant mind to continue to benefit the society.
ReiserFS isn't even a has-been file system, it's an almost-was, and was never a real contender for a top filesystem, no matter how much some users loved it. It was, in reality, half dead by the time Reiser got arrested.
Why wasn't it taken seriously by everyone?
- When it encountered problems, it crashed spectacularly. You didn't just lose a file or a block of a file, you lost entire trees and could get metadata instead of file data and vice versa.
- It lacked basic tools, like "dump"/"restore" or "freeze".
- The fsck rebuild process was a security nightmare. A user could craft a file with data that would appear to the fsck process to be metadata, and take over the system after a reboot. In typical arrogance, the solution was "don't reboot, then".
- It didn't support streams or compatible metadata, thus no Mac sharing or SELinux. SELinux in particular is a requirement for many big corporations right now, and not supporting it means no buy.
And, yes, the arrogance of the maintainer played a part too. But even with a much nicer guy running the show, it would not have been a serious contender for the throne.
It's time we forget ReiserFS and move on.