Well, I can have a look at those patches. But I'd like to know what is
exactly your motivation - is it that you have some customers running with
this clone and want to upstream the fs, or is it that you'd like to
contribute the cool feature you've developped, or something else? Because
on this depends where we should go from the current situation...
To state my position: I'm not willing to merge the feature into ext3
because it's basically in a maintenance mode so we don't accept larger
features to it anymore (for stability reasons).
You could, of course, copy ext3 code base and create a separate next3
filesystem. But such code duplication would be generally frowned upon and I
personally wouldn't like to take the burden of maintaining such code so
you'd have to do it. Moreover you have to port all ext3 fixes to your code
and you have a problem that as time progresses, new features are added to
ext4, not ext3, so I think it would be less and less attractive to run
Next3 instead of ext4... So this doesn't seem like an ideal solution either.
For future, the most promising to me would be to change the
implementation to work with ext4 and merge it there. I understand there are
technical issues with this and I'm not sure how hard they would be to
solve. But for me as a filesystem developper this would seem like a
direction where it's worth to invest some time and energy and I can help
with that (and I believe other ext4 developpers might lend a hand as well).
Just my thoughts... Anyway, I've added to my todo an item to have a look
at your patches so that I have better idea what we are discussing about.
Honza
--
Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
SUSE Labs, CR
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