Reading through the lengthy debate on the lkml titled "silent semantic changes with reiser4" [story] is a time investment. Comprised of well over 500 emails and growing, I include here a tiny snippet containing a discussion primarily between Hans Reiser, Andrew Morton [interview], and Linus Torvalds. Questions raised include whether or not the filesystem should be ultimately merged into the mainline kernel, and if so how to go about this. Much of the debate is regarding extensions that are currently only available through reiser4, and perhaps not fully compatible with existing utilities. The thread within begins with some coments by Andrew, who suggests that if the provided feature set is the desired direction for the Linux kernel, his preference would be to "accept the reiser4-only extensions with a view to turning them into kernel-wide extensions at some time in the future, so all filesystems will offer the extensions (as much as possible)".
As quoted earlier [story], Hans stressed that it was important that the reiser4 functionality be merged so that Linux is capable of competing with WinFS and Spotlight. The argument was continued by others, and to these followup comments Linus retorted:
"Hell will freeze over before Microsoft does a filesystem right. Besides, WinFS is likely almost in user mode anyway, ie mostly a library, rather like the gnome people are already doing with gnome storage. So there's really no point in trying to push your agenda by trying to scare people with MS activities. Linux kernel developers do what's right because it is _right_, not because somebody else does it."
As expected, merging Resier4 into Andrew Morton [interview]'s -mm tree [story] brought with it a lot of additional features and semantic changes. Christoph Hellwig expressed some unhappiness over these semantic changes, spawning a lengthy thread on the lkml. Specifically, he mentioned that the handling of files-as-directories (multiple streams within files) could cause problems to user-space applications, and could cause other dcache problems.
A lot of opposition was expressed. Some mentioned that the handling of multiple streams is really a userspace issue, whereas others mentioned that legacy applications may not properly handle multiple streams which could lead to the loss of user data. This lead Hans Reiser to say in support:
"Andrew, we need to compete with WinFS and Dominic Giampaolo's filesystem for Apple, and that means we need to put search engine and database functionality into the filesystem."
