Michelle Konzack wrote:
Am 2008-11-03 12:00:03, schrieb Volkan YAZICI:I really wonder the future of ReiserFS. I don't follow kernel related improvements (and discussions) that much, but I still don't have a reliable information about the development issues with ReiserFS. Somebody is saying something, and another one is duplicating it -- without giving a single grain of thought -- to others and so on. But AFAIK, there still isn't any official (you know what I mean by _official_) explanation related with ReiserFS. Yep, Hans Reiser did some nasty things. But would development of Linux stop if Linus Torvalds gets in some sort of trouble, e.g. arrested?This is NOT the same, since ReiserFS was generaly developed by ONE KEY PERSON "Hans Reiser" where the Linux Kernel itself has several 1000 contributors which can take over at any time...
That's a nice platitude, but reading the Kernel list for years, it just isn't how it works.
Reality is that if the one or two people who "champion" any particular thing disappear, the crowd deprecates their stuff after asking for volunteers (there rarely are any), and they write something new.
If they don't write something completely new, they still "rewrite" the whole thing, introducing a whole new series of bugs, but basically bugs that THEY understand, instead of them reading and learning and fixing the OLD bugs.
It never stabilizes. A 1000 monkeys all with their own agendas. That's the kernel. Not some fantasy-world 1000 great developers who can and do enjoy reading each other's code and working on other people's pet projects when they're missing/gone.
Let's not sugar-coat it. The most prolific kernel folks are also those who are paid by a company to work on it. That's been shown a number of times via analysis of the check-ins to the source repositories du-jour, which Linus and the kernel team change regularly also.
There's no "there" when talking about the wonderful panacea of open-source development... it's a mess, just like every commercial development effort I've ever seen, but with LESS management and less motivation to leave ABI's alone for "customers", etc.
Nate