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Date:	Tue, 14 Mar 2000 14:26:09 +0300
From:	Hans Reiser <reiser@idiom.com>
To:	Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: (reiserfs) Re: patch: reiserfs for 2.3.49

Mr. Viro, I suggest the following plan.

A) You tell us what you think is broken in detail.

B) We fix it and test it.

C) You review it to see if it looks fixed enough that you can ignore us, and we
take responsibility for whether it is fixed as far as the users are concerned.

We have no desire to have you work on our filesystem, don't worry about that.

Presumably telling us what you think is broken should suffice to put the code to
where it is not somehow a burden to you.  

Alexei, I don't want you to use ext2 code, I want you to write code that is your
code that has no flaws that Viro can point to.  If it is not practical to write
your own, then be very careful to indicate whose it is in the comments.  I
understand that sometimes there is only one way to code an interaction with a
fixed interface.

We are grateful to you for finding bugs in our code Mr. Viro.  We regret not
tracking your VFS bug fixes.  We wrote a VFS compatible file system which is
efficient for small files as the first stage of adding database functionality to
the FS.  This turned out to be quite a lot of work, and after 6 years we are now
where I had thought we would be in 18 months.  Fortunately, with the exception
of BeFS, our competition has the same sorts of problems.  The second stage will
seek to evolve VFS, and then we will indeed focus on VFS.  I am sure that once
we do that you will truly be upset, but let's worry about that in 2.5 once my
plans are more code than vapor shall we?

Alexander Viro wrote:
> However, some of those places do funny
> things with checks for ->i_count and friends. They may be harmless
> atavisms. They may be actual bugs. And they may be band-aids that cover
> real problems 99% of time.

Tell us where you see such things, and Alexei will fix them.  After what he said
to you in that private email, he had best do a good job of it.:-)

> but here there may be need to account for big lock
> changes. And I would be much happier if somebody looked through

Roma and Alexei will have joint responsibility for this, Roma unfortunately may
have other time commitments to another employer and so Alexei will have to take
over if Roma is unable to handle it before Alexei and Chris finish the other
things.

I am ignoring your flame, except to note that my use of the term namespace is
consistent with the CS subculture I grew up in at Berkeley.  

It would be nice if things could be handled in a more positive manner.  Think
about that.

Hans
-- 
You can get ReiserFS at http://devlinux.org/namesys, and customizations and
industrial grade support at reiser@idiom.com.

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