On Fri, 2011-02-04 at 12:03 -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote:

On 02/04/2011 08:17 AM, Jan Kara wrote:

quoted

On Thu 03-02-11 11:32:01, Michael Rubin wrote:

quoted

On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 7:08 AM, Eric Sandeen[off-list ref]  wrote:

quoted

If we can have a real plan for moving in this direction though, I'd
support it.  I'm just not sure how we get enough real testing under
our belts to be comfortable with dropping ext[23], especially as
most distros now default to ext4 anyway.

Eric what sort of testing are you looking for?

I believe Ted wrote a good summary of what combinations of options would
need to be tested on a regular basis to get at least some confidence that
the switch could work.

quoted

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 just
a step away from the code getting broken... It would not be too much work
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

I would definitely be interesting in figuring out if and when we can drop one or 
both of ext2 and ext3. The number of actively supported file systems to test for 
correctness and performance is getting to be a challenge.

ext2 yes ... I think there's no way we can drop ext3: it's still a
current default filesystem for most distributions.  Now, if we discuss
dropping ext2 and working out an end of life plan for ext3 (for the
feature removals schedule) so we don't eventually get into the same
position with it as we are with ext2, then this sounds like a plan.

Great topic, might require beer though to be done right :)

I'm invoking the anti-discrimination statutes here on behalf of those of
us who don't like beer.

James