ReiserFS Officially Declared "Obsolete"

[mos87]

It's pretty off-topic, but since you asked - "sitting in prison" is perfectly normal English. I'm Scottish, and I'd be as likely to say "he is in prison" or "he is sitting in prison".

Well, good to know.
I've run a quick google search before posting tho, and it returned mostly hits with literally sitting while being in a prison cell.

Maybe Americans would use different phrases - they are so fond of locking people up that they have a dozen terms for it.

Not sure about Scotland, but maybe if you were around those parts you could ask some people in London streets in the dead of the night if they felt that the Met police should be a bit more eager in that regard in certain circumstances. Provided anyone would be willing to stop.. to talk to you that is, rather than... ah well.

[Delgarde]

Oh well. Instead of discussing tech we're back at that case.
Anyway, reiserfs 3.6 was pretty nice when one had a lot of small files. Much faster in that case than anything else. It saddens me that there seems not to be enough manpower to maintain this stuff, and makes me wonder if we'll one day lose support for other FSs. That was a strength of Linux that one could access all sorts of media and thus exchange data or even do repairs to other systems.

Yeah, ReiserFS 3 was pretty good for the time... a pioneer for journalling filesystems on Linux. I used it for several years, but the project stalled when Reiser was locked up, and never recovered... the later versions were all out-of-kernel, and that's just not viable in the Linux ecosystem... the number of people willing to use such a thing is very small...

[PuckPoltergeist]

i hope that for compatibility's sake we'll at least be able to read those filesystems via fuse.

You can migrate it to Btrfs in place

[hf_139]

You don't seem to have a good grasp of human nature. Once something is seen as morally tainted, it becomes socially disfavorable. Even if it were technically superior, the mere fact of such taint is enough for people to stop using it.

It works like this: if one person is seen using brand X, others will often mention the moral taint, forcing the first person to justify why they're still using it, anyway. After a while, it gets tiresome to keep explaining your rationale and alternatives start to become more attractive. As the alternatives gain more users, they improve and become even more viable, eventually crossing a tipping-point.

Even if the home Linux user might not be subject to such pressures, it's very applicable to circumstances such as corporate or commercial use that are key for distro maintainers to continue supporting a given feature. Once distros start dropping support for it, the userbase further dwindles.

Lack of users leads to lack of maintainers. The kernel policy is to remove features lacking a maintainer.

Those people are free to just not use it.
I don't think that there is anyone who legitimately stopped to use Linux because of a filesystem of a murderer being an optional module. Corporations who put fake morals and virtue signaling above their commercial value or customers, are very weird and probably shouldn't exit. I don't want a corporation to be a moral guide. I am happy if they castrate themselves by not using anything that doesn't follow into their narrow world view. This is just a reason for me to support ReiserFS even harder.

[jabl]

This is just a reason for me to support ReiserFS even harder.

How are you "supporting reiserfs even harder"? Stanning for it on online forums doesn't really accomplish anything. It's being marked as obsolete because nobody is willing to maintain it. The obvious implication here is that this is an excellent opportunity for you to step up and put your money where your mouth is, and pick up the reiserfs maintainer torch. Good luck!

[mrg666]

So many file systems available in Linux. It's good to remove the one that is not maintained anymore. I was going to say too many but I didn't say since Linux is used in so many different configurations and computing environments. For my personal workstations, ext(2-4) has been very reliable. It's always good to see code cleaned up.

[mrg666]

Those people are free to just not use it.
I don't think that there is anyone who legitimately stopped to use Linux because of a filesystem of a murderer being an optional module. Corporations who put fake morals and virtue signaling above their commercial value or customers, are very weird and probably shouldn't exit. I don't want a corporation to be a moral guide. I am happy if they castrate themselves by not using anything that doesn't follow into their narrow world view. This is just a reason for me to support ReiserFS even harder.

If you don't want a moral guide don't follow it. Nobody will miss you at Disneyland. But there are laws that we all must follow. Simple, right? Coming to your support of ReiserFS, I am glad we found the next developer/maintainer. Code is there for you to fix and resubmit to Linux repository. Again, simple, right?

[carewolf]

What. MurderFS was best FS, it _killed_ the competition 😉

[mangeek]

it's an old FS and there are better choices. It's time it got removed.

Exactly. I was an early adopter of ReiserFS, but its main advantage was a solution to a problem that got solved in more 'mainstream' filesystems along the way. Now it's unmaintained and lacking features that XFS, btrfs, and EXT4 have.

But just to reminisce for a moment... back in the ext3 days, when solid state drives were small-capacity luxury items for Fortune 500 companies and almost everything was on spinning metal, ReiserFS absolutely kicked butt on datastores with lots of small files and huge numbers of files in a directory. I used it for a few production projects where it saved tons of time and space.

[carewolf]

Yeah, ReiserFS 3 was pretty good for the time... a pioneer for journalling filesystems on Linux. I used it for several years, but the project stalled when Reiser was locked up, and never recovered... the later versions were all out-of-kernel, and that's just not viable in the Linux ecosystem... the number of people willing to use such a thing is very small...

It stalled before that, with ReiserFS 4, which never reached stable status before he was locked up.