On Fri, Aug 23, 2019 at 1:44 PM Justin Forbes <jmforbes(a)linuxtx.org> wrote:
All of this, the criteria, and the UI support for btrfs are from the
many years old proposal to make btrfs the default filesystem. In the
beginning, it was not ready, but did show promise. This proposal came
up for several releases in a row, and at the end of it, even the
upstream developers recommended against it.
Josef Bacik alone pushed for it. And it was Fedora that wasn't ready
for Btrfs, not the other way around. In Josef's last couple emails to
devel@ he stated the decision would need to be made by others, not
him. He pretty much gave up once SUSE got there first.
I'm not aware of any upstream developers recommending Fedora not use
it. A significant chunk of upstream are at SUSE and by this time had
moved to Btrfs by default, so it'd be a little weird if they're
recommending against the thing.
At this point, it is safe
to say that btrfs will not be the default. Since that time, things
have not gotten better.
This is ambiguous. One possible way to read this is: no matter what
resources are put into supporting it in Fedora, it's safe to say it
won't be the default. Another possibility: the support resources
necessary haven't materialized, therefore it won't be the default.
I would like to better understand why it is "safe to say" it won't be
the default.
Yes, there is active btrfs development
upstream. It is fairly narrowly focused, and not something we can
rely upon for a supported default among the Fedora use cases.
The thread is ostensibly about whether it's appropriate to block
release on Btrfs related bugs, not whether it should be the default
file system. But as it's been brought up, I'd like to know if there's
any difference in the expected support resources between it remaining
"blocker worthy" versus becoming "a default file system" somewhere in
the Fedora ecosystem in a release blocking capacity (i.e. presumably a
Fedora Spin could choose to make Btrfs its default file system, but
that wouldn't be release blocking).
While
Fedora does enable it in the kernel, and plans to continue doing so,
it is enabled in the "if you break it, you get to keep the pieces"
method of many other options. Sure, we will be happy to bring in a
patch that is headed upstream if it fixes a bug, and someone points us
to it. No, we aren't going to spend time debugging issues with it
ourselves. There is no shortage of issues in more "core" kernel
pieces that require attention.
That's understandable and reasonable. I don't think anyone
uninterested in supporting Btrfs should be made to feel like they
ought to. Life is short, do what you're interested in doing, no more.
--
Chris Murphy