Re: [gentoo-dev] reiserfs

[Alexander Gretencord <arutha@gmx.de>]

On Tuesday 14 May 2002 17:39, Jean-Michel Smith wrote:
> Reiserfs is NOT ready for production use, and the gentoo FAQ is both wise
> and friendly for pointing that out and guiding people away from that
> particular folly.

If you have such experiences it's ok to say so _but_ you have to say why you 
don't recommend reiserfs (or give a pointer to some place where your thesis 
is backed). I've not had any bad experience with ext2 on my workstation at 
home so I'd say it's ok but at work on the latop after one crash I had to do  
a fsck'ing long fsck which then aborted and let me run the whole damn thing 
again manually. So after that I'd say ext2 sucks. But that may not be 
apparent to someone else who has only had good exp like I had at home. So he 
won't believe me if all I say is "ext2 sucks dont use it it's unstable"

> There are plenty of other, much safer filesystems to use, including XFS (if
> you don't need bleeding edge experimental features, e.g. can be happy with
> stock 2.4.18 kernel + xfs patches), JFS, ext3, ext2 (no journalling), and
> so forth.

There are problems with those too. As said earlier (and Mark mentions it too) 
ext2 sucks :) I have no personal experience with JFS but the german computer 
magazine c't tested reiser, ext3, XFS and JFS lately and they had very 
serious stability problems with JFS. So it's basically ext3 against XFS. One 
is a very intrusive patch and the other is ext2 + journaling which is fine if 
you only need a journaling fs and don't care about other deficiencies of 
ext2.

> That having been said, there is a plethora of hard evidence as well as
> anectdotal experiences to learn from, and to indicate that reiser really
> isn't a safe choice to be making.  This is reflected in the gentoo
> installation documentation, IMHO exactly as it should be.

As said earlier, it's ok to tell the people that reiser is not stable in your 
opinion, but tell them _why_! That's my whole point, nothing about being 
emotionally attached to reiser (tho I use it and am happy, but I also use XFS 
and am happy)


Alex

-- 
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety 
deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin