'standard'? You surely must have ment 'Windows-only'.
Your MS-internal lingo is prominent in your reply, are you still betting your life on Microsoft? What will you do once Microsoft/Windows goes the VAX and Novell way?
Sure, there is going to be some sort of.NET cross-platform support - MS has no choice, with only 19% of the webserver share. So it's going to be cross-platform - on the server side only. For a while. Until Microsoft thinks the market is seeded, and suddenly the 'Corel Linux Microsoft.NET' package is seeing unexpected delays, and curiously slow bugfixes.
We know this old world order very well - total control by Microsoft - no, thank you very much.
We've got news for you: welcome to the new world order, where control is yours, welcome to Linux.NET:-)
sorry - I did not mean to offend you. The reason why this conversation got more testy is 1010011010's (IMO) baseless personal attacks against a highly respected member of the kernel developer community. Over issues which were either agreed to and solved 1.5 months ago, or issues which can and are being discussed on the apropriate forums. Few if any kernel developers read this thread and it looks too one-sided if I keep answering all his points - linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu or linux-fsdevel@vger.rutgers.edu is the right forum where everyday VFS development goes on.
Your point about VFS development being 'too fast' in the past couple of months for the casual, eventually non-Linux FS maintainer to follow, I have to agree with you. I do think this is and was a necessery evil. All of fs/*.c and fs/*/*.c got way too messy over the years and nobody really maintained it consistently. This is what Alexander started doing around early 2.3. I do have code that has internal VFS dependencies, and I had my share of interface breakage as well - we've got to live with this. The VFS is one of the most complex pieces of Linux. Documentation is advancing IMO - check out 2.4.0-test2, it has more and more VFS functions documented properly, check out fs/dcache.c for example.
The 'right attitude' IMO is to point out flaws on the apropriate mailing lists, and ask for suggestions how to get around that particular flaw. If your question does not get answered then you have a reason to complain. I'm 100% sure nobody asked any questions about a generic transaction engine on linux-fsdevel ever for example (I just checked the archive to be sure) - 1010011010's implicit and (IMO) bad-faith conclusion was that 'it must be ext3fs-centric'. I think that is the kind of attitude that is very contraproductive.
2. Huh? If you have any technological gripe with ext3fs journaling code then this is sure not the best forum. Whats wrong with creating a fs/journalling (or whatever other) subdirectory to implement generic transaction-handling subsystem for journalling filesystems? Sharing code is a fundamental property of the Linux kernel.
6. See points 1-5,7
You appear to have the wrong type of attitude towards Linux development. Posting your technical questions on Slashdot instead of linux-kernel & | linux-fsdev is one example of this.
Bombing Yugoslavia prevented the same type of genocide that happened in and around Bosnia during the past 10 years, ever since Milosevic took power and detonated all the conflicts that were certainly brewing for hundreds of years. Milosevic got the leader of his party after he held a heated speech in Pristina, where he promised Kosovoar serbs to never let them down. So if any place in the Balkans was set up for a clear case of genocide, then it's Kosovo.
The systematic reduction of albanian's rights within Kosovo, and the growing violence (which increased the voilence done by the KLA as well) was a clear sign. Imagine a gunman who has killed 10 people in the room and you are the last one, aiming at you and shouting 'you will die', what are you going to do? Wait until he shoots wether there would have been one more killing? How likely is it that the gunman instead apologizes to you and lets you go?
Alex, replying to a troll in such a way should really not be your style - I'm sure you can do better. Please answer the previous well-made non-AC points you choose to ignore.
uhm, your only source of information is a Yugoslav propaganda piece? More than onethousand bodies were recovered by forensic experts in the woods around Srebrenica, most of the people were executed. Of course you dont have to believe the criminal experts of some 20 demotratic nations (some of which were and still are sceptical of military intervention in the Balkans, and others were from completely neutral countries), but you could well argue that the Earth is flat actually.
I mean, I would start worrying if the only nations that defend you are China and Cuba, both well-known flagships of democracy;-)
while I'm not Alexander Viro, I try to answer your points.
1) the VFS union has been around since early Linux, and was designed by Linus - this has nothing to do with Alexander Viro. Feel free to submit patches.
2) journaling will be what people submit. Right now ext3fs has a generic journalling subsystem, ie. any other filesystem can use the same transaction engine. Feel free to submit patches if you disagree.
3) feel free to submit patches that make the VFS stackable. Be wary of deadlock, recursion and generic complexity issues.
4) the answer is 'if done right then yes, sure.' Feel free to submit a patch.
5) Feel free to submit patches to Linus.
6) your observation does not match that of mine. As a matter of fact I dont have a vested interest in ReiserFS.
7) sure, feel free to submit patches.
I hope to not sound arrogant, but your VFS-related comments so far did not show a great deal of experience. Writing a filesystem does not necesserily mean you understand the VFS! Please make sure you understand what you are talking about - best way of learning is to post your comments to the linux-kernel and/or linux-fsdev mailing lists, not Slashdot.
Alexander Viro has brought alot of simplification to the 2.4 VFS: despite having 35% more filesystems, the total linecount of filesystem-specific code got 30% smaller. Alexander took lots of filesystems-specific hacks and made them a generic VFS feature. I dont think you want to argue with the fact that this makes the Linux filesystem architecture much more flexible. Ext2fs got only 12% smaller in 2.4, so it's mostly other filesystems that benefitted. (ext2fs got so much attention during the years due to its large 'user mindshare' that it was pretty clean already.)
Are you reading the linux-fsdev mailing list? All I can see is a non-issue, the ->read_inode2() solution was *agreed to by* Alexander Viro, despite the feature and code freeze.
read_inode() cannot be changed right now cleanly due to 2.4 being imminent - end of story. So Alexander Viro has proposed already about two months ago to include a temporary read_inode2() VFS call for the sake of ReiserFS.
The point is, if ReiserFS people were actively participating in Linux VFS development (and Linux development), then they could have cleaned this up properly during 2.3. ESPECIALLY if all you have is an ugly kludge, and not a good/generic solution! So Hans Reiser was demanding an extension that only ReiserFS needs - why doesnt he / didnt he code it himself?
About the conspiracy bit - you raised this whole non-issue, so I thought you believed in it. If we agree then why have you raised this non-issue, asking wether Linux development got 'too political'?
Check out Alexander Viro's email on linux-fsdev (Message-ID: ):
"... you have my vote for temporary inclusion of the *@!#^* ->read_inode2(). AFAICS it's the least of anyone's problems.".
[and check out the subject of this slashdot thread...] THERE IS NO PROBLEM.
Also check out another email on linux-fsdev, , where it becomes clear that Hans Reiser has fundamental misunderstandings wrt. how the Linux VFS works, and Alexander Viro explains him how things work. How does this fit your paranoid conspiracy theories??
There are no generic kernel contributions in that patch. The only generic kernel change is a 15 lines change in fs/inode.c, which is flagged by the author as: 'reiserfs specific hack right here.'. Such 'hacks' are *specifically* the things that prevent a patch from going into the main kernel.
To repeat it, Hans Reiser has not contributed to the Linux kernel on any public mailing list so far in any meaningful way. Looks like he doesnt really care about Linux, but he expects Linux to do everything for him. Not a very sympathetic position to me.
Prosecuting only *4* major Sherman-Act antitrust cases in a century is hardly 'micromanagement'.
If you want to see real micromanagement of economy then you are welcome to the EU. In the EU the Microsoft trial would be a matter of about 3-4 weeks, and Bill Gates would already sit in jail for lying under oath and criminal contempt of court.
'no whining' was in reference to Richard Gooch, the author of DevFS.
Obviously on linux-kernel you'll find a thread about just about any kernel subsystem, with various people representing all mathematically possible positions.
The fact that there were heated discussions about DevFS, and still it made into the kernel appears to support my point that decisions are made on a technical basis and not based on advocacy.
Just to set facts straight, Stalin did not kill 'tens of millions of people' due to political reasons. He killed on the order of 1-3 million people for political reasons, the rest were 'collateral' effects of his economic policies, like famine. Not that it makes his role any better.
That all might be true, but still, the question is not the behavior of the US government 55 years ago, but the fundamental question: should Nazi Germany have been 'left alone' like you claim should be done in conflicts?
I personally can well imagine the US being more afraid of Josif Stalin than of Hitler, at least until 1942. Stalin has already proven that he is capable of killing millions of people. It was not at all clear until last 1943 / early 1944 that Nazi Germany started the extermination of jews.
I can well imagine the US letting the USSR alone against Nazi Germany - that would have been a shame. Nevertheless the US did send supply to the USSR, which probably tipped the balance in favor of USSR troops in the Stalingrad battle. After Stalingrad all the production facilities in western Siberia (and probably even worse, the oil in the Kaukasus) would have been exposed to the germans. Nevertheless I agree with you that the hesitation of the US to enter the war did cost millions of lives in the USSR, and that cannot be forgiven.
France's participation in WWII was mostly symbolic, given that they were occupied during the decisive stage of the war, the real participants were USSR, US and Britain, against Germany, Italy and Japan. (sure there were other countries present as well, most of which participated in heroic and important battles.)
What's your point? Reiserfs might have had lots of releases, so did devfs and still it got into the kernel without much whining.
Linus always agreed to journaling filesystems in principle. Given conceptual agreement it always depends on the quality of said patch wether it gets accepted. Thats all.
It's important to note that the Microsoft action got only possible *BECAUSE* Microsoft has a OS monopoly. The DOJ *CANNOT* prosecute any non-monopoly US company for anticompetitive practices, barring a few very basic practices like price fixing. Rambus is far from being a monopoly in the RAM market. US antitrust laws are so weak that it's scary. Ask the GOP and their 'big business -friendly' antitrust policy why there are no tough pro-compentition laws, and why there are more and more big-business-protecting laws passed like UCITA. Ask the GOP why the budget of the DOJ antitrust division got frozen. (despite much heavier merger activity, the division's budget did not rise accordingly.)
ramfs/cramfs is not possible in 2.2. The 2.3 pagecache redesign enabled ramfs/cramfs.
Linus objected to specific devfs patches for more than 2 years. It took alot of time for Richard Gooch to fix all the issues that devfs had. While Linus supported the *idea* of devfs, it took from early 1998 to this year, with more than 100 releases, that devfs be accepted into the mainstream 2.4 kernel.
So - going back a bit in history just to show the obvious flaw in your argument - Nazi Germany should have been left alone - they would clearly have stopped after some natural amount of time, after killing/gasing everybody not of arjan descent (including most of Russia). At that time this ment something on the order of a few 100 million people, and a vast array of unique cultural heritage would have been destroyed in an irreparable way by the nazis. So your opinion is that this should have happened, instead of Britain/USSR/US getting involved in a 'naturally unfolding' conflict?
Bosnia was indeed 'left alone' as you say, and 200 thousand people died. 'Doing nothing' ('letting the rock fall') caused the death of tenthousand muslims in Sebrenica. Is that the kind of peace and sovereignty of nations you envision?
And there is no oil nor anything worth in Kosovo. No administration could have pulled a war like this off, and even this way the Clinton administration has the Republicans^H^H^H^Hwolves hanging off their throats for 'waste of taxpayer money'. Just look at the position of the GOP to see the selfish american politics that has dominated this land for such a long time. By the way, there is no oil nor anything worth mentioning in Kosovo, and there is much cheaper (and much more isolated and less militant and less organized) mass-labor force in Asia. Your suggestion is not credible, think for a moment. Dont you think that there is a tiny chance, just by the rule of big numbers, that the US sometimes does something good - just by accident? I mean, even assuming that the US was the evil, the US could make mistakes as well and do something good, occasionally, right?
How come other filesystems have no 'problems' getting into the Linux kernel? How come that the number of filesystems in 2.4 is 35% more than in 2.2? Why is it that every kernel developer who contributes on a daily basis acknowledges Alexander Viro's hard work of cleaning up the VFS? Witness Mandrake and SuSE kernel developers defending Alexander Viro in the other thread, so it's ridiculous to shout 'Red Hat conspiracy'.
New filesystems in 2.4:
shmfs (a much bigger change to the VFS and MM layer than any journaling filesystem. Stephen Tweedie wrote a journaling ext3fs on almost-vanilla 2.2 VFS, so it's not rocket science.)
ramfs/cramfs. Features compressed file data - not a triviality either.
devfs. Despite Linus' reservations against devfs, it's in the 2.4 kernel.
This whole 'Reiserfs' argument is a red herring. Hans Reiser has to get his act together, and he should start contributing to the Linux codebase on a daily basis so that he can integrate potential extensions cleanly. Hans Reiser's problem could be rather that he financially depends on Reiserfs to succeed?
Lets forget about the past (of the US and the USSR) for a second.
Do you agree that in the last 10 years (eg. starting _after_ the Gulf War) the US foreign policy was pretty sane from a human point of view?
The US bribed^H^H^Hpayed IRA and Ulster Union leaders to stop fighting in Northern Ireland (knock on wood).
They bribed^H^H^H^Hpayed Israel to find the peace process attractive.
They brought fragile but existing peace to Bosnia, and started the same in Kosovo. If you take the preservation of human lives as a universal standard, then there were less people killed in Kosovo this year than in a month (you pick the month) two years ago.
Yes, IMO this peace was worth those innocent ~400 lives caused by the air-raids (as counted by Yugoslav propaganda - not the tens of thousands they claimed initially), if you balance this against those many kosovoans *not* being killed now. The bosnian war took an estimated 200 thousands lives, so that was the prospective. If you are forced to pick between hundreds of lives and get your hands bloody, and thousands of lives but stay clean, which one would you pick?
If there is a huge rock falling down towards 100 people and you have the option to push a button that redirects the rock to another group of 10 people, what would you do? Save 90 lives and become a killer (of those 10 people who would not have died otherwise), or let 100 people die but stay morally clean? If you have the power to actually *do something*, these are the questions you face every day.
1) Reiserfs folks should start getting involved in everyday Linux-fs development, instead of sitting in their cathedral.
2) Reiserfs folks should start posting useful patches to the linux-kernel mailing list. Patches that benefit all filesystems and the generic architecture of Linux.
3) just post the patch in two parts: generic changes and lowlevel FS changes. Such patches are posted and merged on an everyday basis, eg. Linux now has a shared-memory filesystem!
It's not at all up to Linus to do the merge. It's the *Reiserfs folks* who should get more involved with the Linux kernel and should learn how to merge things. There were similar or bigger projects merged lately, for example USB, RAID, LVM, framebuffer subsystem. So a merge is easy: JUST DO IT, and stop whining, please.
Alexander Viro has simplified the VFS greatly during the 2.3 kernel cycle. Linux 2.4 has 37 filesystems integrated into the kernel, this was 28 in Linux 2.2. BUT the total line count of 2.4's fs code is down to 128 KLOCs, while its 166 KLOCs in 2.2! This simplification of the fs architecture is largely due to Alexander Viro's (and Linus') work. 35% more filesystems but 30% less total line count, this is a plain miracle.
ext2fs is 4874 lines in 2.4, 5548 lines in 2.2, a 13% reduction. So in fact, contrary to your assertion, ext2fs was one of the filesystems which saw a *much smaller than average* benefit of 2.4's VFS enhancements.
Hans (or whichever reiserfs developer you are), your whining is pityful. Trying to lobby your filesystem (which bears your name, now talk about being modest) by bashing another kernel hacker who has posted *so many* patches for the generic kernel while not adding even one copyright notice is just plain disgusting. Get a life Hans, when was the last time we saw *any* patch from you showing up on linux-fsdev or linux-kernel?
Thank you Alexander Viro for your contributions, your hard work is very much welcome. Ignore the vultures:-)
Slashdot Mirror
'standard'? You surely must have ment 'Windows-only'.
Your MS-internal lingo is prominent in your reply, are you still betting your life on Microsoft? What will you do once Microsoft/Windows goes the VAX and Novell way?
Sure, there is going to be some sort of .NET cross-platform support - MS has no choice, with only 19% of the webserver share. So it's going to be cross-platform - on the server side only. For a while. Until Microsoft thinks the market is seeded, and suddenly the 'Corel Linux Microsoft.NET' package is seeing unexpected delays, and curiously slow bugfixes.
We know this old world order very well - total control by Microsoft - no, thank you very much.
We've got news for you: welcome to the new world order, where control is yours, welcome to Linux.NET :-)
Your point about VFS development being 'too fast' in the past couple of months for the casual, eventually non-Linux FS maintainer to follow, I have to agree with you. I do think this is and was a necessery evil. All of fs/*.c and fs/*/*.c got way too messy over the years and nobody really maintained it consistently. This is what Alexander started doing around early 2.3. I do have code that has internal VFS dependencies, and I had my share of interface breakage as well - we've got to live with this. The VFS is one of the most complex pieces of Linux. Documentation is advancing IMO - check out 2.4.0-test2, it has more and more VFS functions documented properly, check out fs/dcache.c for example.
The 'right attitude' IMO is to point out flaws on the apropriate mailing lists, and ask for suggestions how to get around that particular flaw. If your question does not get answered then you have a reason to complain. I'm 100% sure nobody asked any questions about a generic transaction engine on linux-fsdevel ever for example (I just checked the archive to be sure) - 1010011010's implicit and (IMO) bad-faith conclusion was that 'it must be ext3fs-centric'. I think that is the kind of attitude that is very contraproductive.
Does this answer your points sufficiently?
6. See points 1-5,7
You appear to have the wrong type of attitude towards Linux development. Posting your technical questions on Slashdot instead of linux-kernel & | linux-fsdev is one example of this.
The systematic reduction of albanian's rights within Kosovo, and the growing violence (which increased the voilence done by the KLA as well) was a clear sign. Imagine a gunman who has killed 10 people in the room and you are the last one, aiming at you and shouting 'you will die', what are you going to do? Wait until he shoots wether there would have been one more killing? How likely is it that the gunman instead apologizes to you and lets you go?
Alex, replying to a troll in such a way should really not be your style - I'm sure you can do better. Please answer the previous well-made non-AC points you choose to ignore.
I mean, I would start worrying if the only nations that defend you are China and Cuba, both well-known flagships of democracy ;-)
1) the VFS union has been around since early Linux, and was designed by Linus - this has nothing to do with Alexander Viro. Feel free to submit patches.
2) journaling will be what people submit. Right now ext3fs has a generic journalling subsystem, ie. any other filesystem can use the same transaction engine. Feel free to submit patches if you disagree.
3) feel free to submit patches that make the VFS stackable. Be wary of deadlock, recursion and generic complexity issues.
4) the answer is 'if done right then yes, sure.' Feel free to submit a patch.
5) Feel free to submit patches to Linus.
6) your observation does not match that of mine. As a matter of fact I dont have a vested interest in ReiserFS.
7) sure, feel free to submit patches.
I hope to not sound arrogant, but your VFS-related comments so far did not show a great deal of experience. Writing a filesystem does not necesserily mean you understand the VFS! Please make sure you understand what you are talking about - best way of learning is to post your comments to the linux-kernel and/or linux-fsdev mailing lists, not Slashdot.
Alexander Viro has brought alot of simplification to the 2.4 VFS: despite having 35% more filesystems, the total linecount of filesystem-specific code got 30% smaller. Alexander took lots of filesystems-specific hacks and made them a generic VFS feature. I dont think you want to argue with the fact that this makes the Linux filesystem architecture much more flexible. Ext2fs got only 12% smaller in 2.4, so it's mostly other filesystems that benefitted. (ext2fs got so much attention during the years due to its large 'user mindshare' that it was pretty clean already.)
The point is, if ReiserFS people were actively participating in Linux VFS development (and Linux development), then they could have cleaned this up properly during 2.3. ESPECIALLY if all you have is an ugly kludge, and not a good/generic solution! So Hans Reiser was demanding an extension that only ReiserFS needs - why doesnt he / didnt he code it himself?
About the conspiracy bit - you raised this whole non-issue, so I thought you believed in it. If we agree then why have you raised this non-issue, asking wether Linux development got 'too political'?
"... you have my
vote for temporary inclusion of the *@!#^* ->read_inode2(). AFAICS it's
the least of anyone's problems.".
[and check out the subject of this slashdot thread...] THERE IS NO PROBLEM.
Also check out another email on linux-fsdev, , where it becomes clear that Hans Reiser has fundamental misunderstandings wrt. how the Linux VFS works, and Alexander Viro explains him how things work. How does this fit your paranoid conspiracy theories??
To repeat it, Hans Reiser has not contributed to the Linux kernel on any public mailing list so far in any meaningful way. Looks like he doesnt really care about Linux, but he expects Linux to do everything for him. Not a very sympathetic position to me.
If you want to see real micromanagement of economy then you are welcome to the EU. In the EU the Microsoft trial would be a matter of about 3-4 weeks, and Bill Gates would already sit in jail for lying under oath and criminal contempt of court.
I cannot see a single from Hans Reiser neither on linux-kernel, nor on linux-fsdev. *NOT A SINGLE ONELINER PATCH* This pretty much tells it all.
Obviously on linux-kernel you'll find a thread about just about any kernel subsystem, with various people representing all mathematically possible positions.
The fact that there were heated discussions about DevFS, and still it made into the kernel appears to support my point that decisions are made on a technical basis and not based on advocacy.
Just to set facts straight, Stalin did not kill 'tens of millions of people' due to political reasons. He killed on the order of 1-3 million people for political reasons, the rest were 'collateral' effects of his economic policies, like famine. Not that it makes his role any better.
I personally can well imagine the US being more afraid of Josif Stalin than of Hitler, at least until 1942. Stalin has already proven that he is capable of killing millions of people. It was not at all clear until last 1943 / early 1944 that Nazi Germany started the extermination of jews.
I can well imagine the US letting the USSR alone against Nazi Germany - that would have been a shame. Nevertheless the US did send supply to the USSR, which probably tipped the balance in favor of USSR troops in the Stalingrad battle. After Stalingrad all the production facilities in western Siberia (and probably even worse, the oil in the Kaukasus) would have been exposed to the germans. Nevertheless I agree with you that the hesitation of the US to enter the war did cost millions of lives in the USSR, and that cannot be forgiven.
France's participation in WWII was mostly symbolic, given that they were occupied during the decisive stage of the war, the real participants were USSR, US and Britain, against Germany, Italy and Japan. (sure there were other countries present as well, most of which participated in heroic and important battles.)
Linus always agreed to journaling filesystems in principle. Given conceptual agreement it always depends on the quality of said patch wether it gets accepted. Thats all.
ramfs/cramfs is not possible in 2.2. The 2.3 pagecache redesign enabled ramfs/cramfs.
Linus objected to specific devfs patches for more than 2 years. It took alot of time for Richard Gooch to fix all the issues that devfs had. While Linus supported the *idea* of devfs, it took from early 1998 to this year, with more than 100 releases, that devfs be accepted into the mainstream 2.4 kernel.
So - going back a bit in history just to show the obvious flaw in your argument - Nazi Germany should have been left alone - they would clearly have stopped after some natural amount of time, after killing/gasing everybody not of arjan descent (including most of Russia). At that time this ment something on the order of a few 100 million people, and a vast array of unique cultural heritage would have been destroyed in an irreparable way by the nazis. So your opinion is that this should have happened, instead of Britain/USSR/US getting involved in a 'naturally unfolding' conflict?
And there is no oil nor anything worth in Kosovo. No administration could have pulled a war like this off, and even this way the Clinton administration has the Republicans^H^H^H^Hwolves hanging off their throats for 'waste of taxpayer money'. Just look at the position of the GOP to see the selfish american politics that has dominated this land for such a long time. By the way, there is no oil nor anything worth mentioning in Kosovo, and there is much cheaper (and much more isolated and less militant and less organized) mass-labor force in Asia. Your suggestion is not credible, think for a moment. Dont you think that there is a tiny chance, just by the rule of big numbers, that the US sometimes does something good - just by accident? I mean, even assuming that the US was the evil, the US could make mistakes as well and do something good, occasionally, right?
How come other filesystems have no 'problems' getting into the Linux kernel? How come that the number of filesystems in 2.4 is 35% more than in 2.2? Why is it that every kernel developer who contributes on a daily basis acknowledges Alexander Viro's hard work of cleaning up the VFS? Witness Mandrake and SuSE kernel developers defending Alexander Viro in the other thread, so it's ridiculous to shout 'Red Hat conspiracy'.
New filesystems in 2.4:
shmfs (a much bigger change to the VFS and MM layer than any journaling filesystem. Stephen Tweedie wrote a journaling ext3fs on almost-vanilla 2.2 VFS, so it's not rocket science.)
ramfs/cramfs. Features compressed file data - not a triviality either.
devfs. Despite Linus' reservations against devfs, it's in the 2.4 kernel.
This whole 'Reiserfs' argument is a red herring. Hans Reiser has to get his act together, and he should start contributing to the Linux codebase on a daily basis so that he can integrate potential extensions cleanly. Hans Reiser's problem could be rather that he financially depends on Reiserfs to succeed?
Do you agree that in the last 10 years (eg. starting _after_ the Gulf War) the US foreign policy was pretty sane from a human point of view?
The US bribed^H^H^Hpayed IRA and Ulster Union leaders to stop fighting in Northern Ireland (knock on wood).
They bribed^H^H^H^Hpayed Israel to find the peace process attractive.
They brought fragile but existing peace to Bosnia, and started the same in Kosovo. If you take the preservation of human lives as a universal standard, then there were less people killed in Kosovo this year than in a month (you pick the month) two years ago.
Yes, IMO this peace was worth those innocent ~400 lives caused by the air-raids (as counted by Yugoslav propaganda - not the tens of thousands they claimed initially), if you balance this against those many kosovoans *not* being killed now. The bosnian war took an estimated 200 thousands lives, so that was the prospective. If you are forced to pick between hundreds of lives and get your hands bloody, and thousands of lives but stay clean, which one would you pick?
If there is a huge rock falling down towards 100 people and you have the option to push a button that redirects the rock to another group of 10 people, what would you do? Save 90 lives and become a killer (of those 10 people who would not have died otherwise), or let 100 people die but stay morally clean? If you have the power to actually *do something*, these are the questions you face every day.
1) Reiserfs folks should start getting involved in everyday Linux-fs development, instead of sitting in their cathedral.
2) Reiserfs folks should start posting useful patches to the linux-kernel mailing list. Patches that benefit all filesystems and the generic architecture of Linux.
3) just post the patch in two parts: generic changes and lowlevel FS changes. Such patches are posted and merged on an everyday basis, eg. Linux now has a shared-memory filesystem!
It's not at all up to Linus to do the merge. It's the *Reiserfs folks* who should get more involved with the Linux kernel and should learn how to merge things. There were similar or bigger projects merged lately, for example USB, RAID, LVM, framebuffer subsystem. So a merge is easy: JUST DO IT, and stop whining, please.
Alexander Viro has simplified the VFS greatly during the 2.3 kernel cycle. Linux 2.4 has 37 filesystems integrated into the kernel, this was 28 in Linux 2.2. BUT the total line count of 2.4's fs code is down to 128 KLOCs, while its 166 KLOCs in 2.2! This simplification of the fs architecture is largely due to Alexander Viro's (and Linus') work. 35% more filesystems but 30% less total line count, this is a plain miracle.
ext2fs is 4874 lines in 2.4, 5548 lines in 2.2, a 13% reduction. So in fact, contrary to your assertion, ext2fs was one of the filesystems which saw a *much smaller than average* benefit of 2.4's VFS enhancements.
Hans (or whichever reiserfs developer you are), your whining is pityful. Trying to lobby your filesystem (which bears your name, now talk about being modest) by bashing another kernel hacker who has posted *so many* patches for the generic kernel while not adding even one copyright notice is just plain disgusting. Get a life Hans, when was the last time we saw *any* patch from you showing up on linux-fsdev or linux-kernel?
Thank you Alexander Viro for your contributions, your hard work is very much welcome. Ignore the vultures :-)