From: Jan Kara Subject: Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC] Drop ext2/ext3 codebase? When? Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2011 14:17:39 +0100 Message-ID: <20110204131739.GC4104@quack.suse.cz> References: <20110203144011.GA28409@quack.suse.cz> <4D4AC4E2.701@redhat.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Cc: Eric Sandeen , Jan Kara , lsf-pc@lists.linuxfoundation.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org, Andrew Morton To: Michael Rubin Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ext4.vger.kernel.org On Thu 03-02-11 11:32:01, Michael Rubin wrote: > On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 7:08 AM, Eric Sandeen wro= te: > > If we can have a real plan for moving in this direction though, I'd > > support it. =A0I'm just not sure how we get enough real testing und= er > > our belts to be comfortable with dropping ext[23], especially as > > most distros now default to ext4 anyway. >=20 > Eric what sort of testing are you looking for? I believe Ted wrote a good summary of what combinations of options woul= d need to be tested on a regular basis to get at least some confidence th= at the switch could work. > I admit I like having ext2 around for comparisons in bug situations. > It really helps to isolate the problem area. How painful is the > upkeep? Well, for me it's a couple of hours per week on average I'd say. Plus there is some work other people do when changing some VFS/MM interfaces influencing all the filesystems. The time I spend is enough to keep ext3 in a good shape I believe but I have a feeling that ext2 is slowly bitrotting. Sometime when I look at ext2 code I see stuff we simply do differently these days and that's ju= st a step away from the code getting broken... It would not be too much wo= rk to clean things up and maintain but it's a work with no clear gain (if = you do the thankless job of maintaining old code, you should at least have users who appreciate that ;) so naturally no one does it. Honza --=20 Jan Kara SUSE Labs, CR -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel= " in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html