Re: btrfs

[Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au>]

On Wed, 7 Oct 2009, Martin Ågren <martin.agren@gmail.com> wrote:
> I believe one of us misread Russell. :) I thought he meant "While I
> understand that you'll be crapped on if a kernel upload eats data, I
> think it would be ok to ...". As I read it, he's not expecting them to
> do anything *more* than they already do, just to relax the protection
> argument a little when it comes to people who are already aiming at
> their feet.

Yes.  Also anyone who really wants their data to be safe won't use Unstable 
anyway.

BTRFS is a little different to most kernel features, it is significant (both 
in terms of potential benefits and changes), it has a high profile, and it 
needs a lot of testing.

I would not consider asking the kernel team to do anything special for a 
random device driver or anything else of similar scope.

But it has been pointed out a few times (including a couple of private 
messages) that experimental has what I desire (thanks for the advice 
everyone).  Now I've discovered that firmware-linux-nonfree doesn't seem to 
be available so I can't use my e100 Ethernet ports (which are essential for 
the test machine in question).

On Wed, 7 Oct 2009, Alexey Salmin <alexey.salmin@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it's reasonable for package maintainers to check compatibility
> with the kernel from the
> distribution they upload package to. Especialy here when package is
> newer then kernel driver.
> It's of course harder to supervise the situation when kernel pass
> ahead of user-space packages
> but it's also possible.

In general I agree that user-space tools should not be uploaded until there is 
a kernel that can work with them.  The fact that I made a filesystem with 
mkfs.btrfs and can't mount it is obviously not ideal.  Of course with this 
type of change if the upload of the btrfs-tools had been delayed so that the 
kernel got in first then we would STILL have had the same situation (I 
believe that there was neither forward nor backward compatibility).

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