Why isn't F2FS support in the Kernel?

[Josh Boyer]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 10:57 AM, Gerald B. Cox <gbcox at bzb.us> wrote:

Please don't top post.

> Incredulous yes, angry no.  I came here instead of bugzilla because I
> thought the issue
> needed a wider audience - especially since it's made its way into the linux
> media.
> IMO the decision to exclude F2FS was a mistake.  The arguments stated as to
> why it wasn't included
> don't really stand up to scrutiny.  Being under heavy development hasn't

Would you have been willing to handle any and all F2FS bugs that are
reported against the kernel?  Maintenance and bug handling doesn't
come for free.  Granted, reports against this will likely be low now
but they're certainly not going to be dealt with at the same priority
level as other bugs.

So while you may think it was a mistake, the people that actually have
to handle the kernel weren't in a position to deal with bug reports
against a filesystem that was under heavy development at the time that
brought little benefit to Fedora itself.  If F2FS is in a better state
now, then it makes it easier to enable.

> stopped other features.... as I mentioned earlier
> BTRFS is the poster child for this.  Now we're in a situation where products

BTRFS is actually a poster child for enabling something before it was
really ready, people getting excited about it, and then being
disappointed when it isn't actually ready (still).  It's certainly
useful, but I wouldn't hold it up as an example of something we did
correctly.

> are actually being
> rolled out that ship with F2FS, other major Linux distributions support it,
> and
> the one linux distribution which prides itself on having the latest and
> greatest doesn't have it.

Latest and greatest is good and all, but not at the expense of
throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.  A year and a half ago,
that's the situation F2FS was in.

> Sorry if my tone was overly aggressive... it's just very disappointing.

Really?  It's very disappointing that a single module that isn't used
for anything in Fedora itself is disabled?  I understand the desire to
want to tinker, but to be very disappointed in this is... well it's
odd.

josh