I used the Reiser4 fs for some time and would love to see it get into the mainline kernel. I would think the project can still go forward even if Hans is not able to contribute these days. Is there any mention on a mailing list or elsewhere of plans to get Reiser4 into the mainline kernel?
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Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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barrymac
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4I'm not so sure this is a good question. Only answers of varying degrees of speculation exist, and you can google all of those answers. – Jun 08 '11 at 16:30
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Ok well i'll leave it up for a while see how it goes. I'm hoping someone closer to the project is on here. – barrymac Jun 08 '11 at 16:43
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technically if it requires "close to the project" it's not a valid question on here and is offtopic. If you want people close to the project go ask the project mailing list. I will decide whether to close this in the morning. – xenoterracide Jun 09 '11 at 03:23
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@bruce maybe but it seems it requires some knowledge of the answer to google accurately. I believe I found the article I did only because I've read it before. – xenoterracide Jun 09 '11 at 03:28
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The reason isn't so much technical or necessarily political, but perhaps pragmatic. Edward Shishkin says that before it goes mainline it needs vendor support
Hello Michael. I don't see any technical obstacles for Reiser4 inclusion. There are only organisation ones: I don't think it will be accepted without support from some vendor. One company might have an interest in developing Reiser4, as they said, however, there is no essential progress in this direction for now.. Thanks, Edward.
xenoterracide
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Surely the project can still go forward even if Hans is not able to contribute these days.
Perhaps that's true, but after Hans Reiser was convicted of murder in 2007, the company he founded and operated that was truly responsible for the filesystem code stopped operating, and things seemed to quickly grind to a halt.
Apparently Edward Shishkin is the current maintainer, or at least appears to be. He's noted a few times since 2009 that he wanted to push for mainline in the 2011-ish timeframe, with the last message suggesting the goal was back in January. The last Reiser4 patch is for kernel 2.6.38, while 2.6.39 is the current version and 2.6.40 3.0.0 is the current release candidate.
In the linked mailing list message, it's clear that proposing Reiser4 for being mainlined isn't necessarily a political challenge, but is at least a technical one. In the linked mailing list post, Edward noted that:
Once we adjust reiser4 to upcoming VFS scalability changes, all the to-do-for-inclusion issues will be resolved.
It's not clear if this is done or not.
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2I wish people could separate the quality of the code from the developer's personal life. Yes it's terrible what happened but the code is still valuable. Thank you for your answer and the links! – barrymac Jun 08 '11 at 17:44
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@charles no offense but this isn't entirely accurate. There is currently no technical or seemingly political reason. I would describe it as pragmatism. Also @barrymac – xenoterracide Jun 09 '11 at 03:19
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@xenoterracide, I've edited my answer with wording from the maintainer that suggests there was at least one technical issue to resolve before kernel inclusion could occur. – Charles Jun 09 '11 at 05:29
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@barrymac From what I recall on the mailinglists back when I still had time to follow it, Reiser made fairly strenuous efforts to *not* separate the quality of the code from the quality of him as a person, to the point of throwing a public tantrum when Alan pointed out that a three-line copyright message every time reiserfs was loaded was a bit much and interpreting it as a personal attack... – Shadur Jun 09 '11 at 05:40
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@Shadur Wow, it should be forked. I thought it was GPL, didn't realise there were licencing issues! – barrymac Jun 09 '11 at 09:57
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I'm pretty sure it is GPL, it's just that Reiser threw a fit anyway when his three licensing lines were condensed into one. That was more than half a decade ago, though, and my memory isn't exact on that. – Shadur Jun 09 '11 at 11:05
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