AFS For Linux 5.1 Would Have Pleased Firefox/SQLite But Was Rejected As Untested Crap

The Andrew File-System (AFS) continues to evolve as a distributed file-system. Over the past year and a half there's been a lot of activity to AFS in the mainline Linux kernel, including material slated for the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel but then Linus Torvalds ended up having to un-pull the changes.

Should you be wanting to run the Mozilla Firefox web browser from this distributed file-system or other applications relying upon the SQLite embedded database, the process should be smoother once this new file-system driver code lands. AFS in the material for Linux 5.1 was going to have fine-grained locking that satisfies the likes of Firefox and SQLite. There's also other work to "improve the life of desktop applications" with other file locking fixes, silly-rename support, and other changes.

Those wanting to see the complete list of Andrew File-System changes can do so via this pull request. Unfortunately though it's not going to be merged for Linux 5.1.

Linus Torvalds responded with:

I pulled, and immediately unpulled.

The thing hasn't even seen a compiler, and when you *do* show the code to a compiler, said compiler correctly warns about afs_do_silly_unlink() potentially returning an uninitialized variable.

And yes, it's _trivially_ and obviously uninitialized.

Feel free to submit this for 5.2 after it has actually seen testing. But this late in the 5.1 merge window, I'm no longer interested in totally untested new crap. It clearly wasn't ready before the merge window, and it clearly isn't ready *now*.

Much too late to try to fix this up,

Linus still stands up for code quality, contrary to those having raised concerns Torvalds was becoming too "soft" after last year's sabbatical -- the only difference now is no swear words in his messages when communicating his reasons for rejecting code.