question about ReiserFS

[Gerald Richter <richter@oehtb.at>]

Dear Debusers!

I'm currently facing a maybe minor problem connected with the necessity of a journaling FS. And -due to my lazyness- what I am searching for, is a sleek solution.

I run a production system mainly as a mail server for a user-base of about 250 mail-users, choice was qmail. And I wanted to increase the fail-safety of wrtie-accesses to the maildirs, so I think about switching from ext2fs to reiserFS.

distri: potato (Debian)
kernel: 2.2.19-pre17
kernel-patch: reiserfs for 2.2.19

Questions: 
1.: are there incompatibilities if I apply a base-patch to a pre*-kernel?
2.: if so, how do i proceed?
3.: how do i get the reiser patch-package, which automagically unpacks everything to the right place by using the (pre)inst-scripts, to cooperate with this pre17 version?

thanks for help,
Gerald