Message-ID: <44DB9CA1.2050306@garzik.org>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2006 16:52:49 -0400
From: Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>
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To: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
CC: Mingming Cao <cmm@us.ibm.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       ext2-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/5] Forking ext4 filesystem from ext3 filesystem
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Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Aug 2006 16:22:26 -0400
> Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org> wrote:
> 
>> I strongly disagree that ext3 should be subject to a spring cleaning. 
>> Comments, whitespace, very very minor things, sure.  Trying to get rid 
>> of brelse() when _many_ other filesystems also use it?  ext4 material.
> 
> We should seek to minimise the difficulty of cross-porting bugfixes and
> enhancements.  Putting cleanups in only ext4 works against that.
> 
> ext3 will be around for many years yet.  We cannot just let it rot due to
> some false belief that performing routine maintenance against it will for
> some magical reason cause it to break.

Because ext4 is impending, you want to push a bunch of cleanups into 
ext3 over a short span of time.  That's not routine maintenance at all. 
  We're not talking about routine maintenance.  In your words, we are 
talking about spring cleaning.

Why not let the devel/stable system work its magic?  If the cleanups are 
viable, proving that first in ext4 should give us more confidence to put 
them into ext3.

Cross-porting bugfixes and cleanups will _obviously_ be quite easy, 
during the first few months of ext4's life.

Just look at ext2->ext3 history.  Regardless of when you make the split, 
there will be a bunch of stuff people wish to backport after the split 
occurs.  Given that, it makes more sense to testbed the changes in ext4 
first.

	Jeff


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