Reiser4 File System Still In Development 317
An anonymous reader writes "Reiser4 still hasn't been merged into the mainline Linux kernel, but it's still being worked on by a small group of developers following Hans Reiser being convicted for murdering his wife. Reiser4 was updated in September on SourceForge to work with the Linux 3.5 kernel and has been benchmarked against EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and ReiserFS. Reiser4 loses out in most of the Linux file-system performance tests, has much stigma due to Hans Reiser, and Btrfs is surpassing it feature-wise, so does it have any future in Linux ahead?"
Let Hans Reiser work (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no reason why a convict should be denied the tools and space to develop software when that software is in everyone's best interest. Even if it was some sort of nonsense app that would provide an income for a convict following release or just keep his skills up to par so that he had hope of earning a living upon release it would be in the public interest.
One of the main reasons for another conviction often relates to convicts being kept out of decent jobs when they are put on the streets. If people can not earn a living they don't just dry out like a worm on a sidewalk. A legal living made unavailable will steer them into crime, or cause drunken behaviors that lead to re-arrest.
Re:Time to let it go... (Score:4, Interesting)
Reiser4 was supposed to give us a different way of working with file metadata by making files into directories, was supposed to allow us to set different file permissions on every line of /etc/passwd, or maybe every field. All those features were dropped though, so what's the point now when other filesystems are further ahead in other areas?
Re:Rename it (Score:3, Interesting)
No point. I mean Henry Ford was an anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer, but they didn't change the company name because of that. Need to separate the person from the product.
Re:Time to let it go... (Score:5, Interesting)
Journaling is not the main attraction of ReiserFS. It's the validation of the million-small-file design. Why use a database? Why accumulate records in larger files? Just make every record a separate file (and Hans Reiser wanted to go even further down that path).
Numerous software systems have employed the million-small-file approach. It is simple, natural, attractive. There are lots of handy shell utilities for ad-hoc scripts and other useful tricks.
The ReiserFS was all about the namespace. We already have it in linux/unix. It's the file system namespace. It should be used to the fullest. Reading a small file should be as efficient as reading a line of a larger file.
Screw SQL. All data should be amenable to grep, awk, perl, od, rm, mv, ln, sort, head, cut &co.
Re:Why would you even care? (Score:5, Interesting)
And maybe that's the real damning point. Reiser was arrogant enough to murder, but not clever enough to get away with it. I'm not sure I want a system-level software product of a mentality like that. The phrase "too clever by half" [tvtropes.org] comes to mind... clever enough to attempt something dangerous to my files, but not clever enough to actually make it succeed.