Reiserfs question

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 09:40 -0400, Amitabha Roy wrote:
> I am curious about the pros and cons of the various file systems. I have
> always used ext3. Is there any particular reason to use reiserfs  ?
> 
> What benefits do you get ?

Don't even start, you're baiting the trolls...  for some people,
filesystems are a religious issue and you won't get much objectivity
from asking that question.

reiser has always been more efficient than ext3 at handling large
directories and at keeping small files small on-disk.

ext3 has been safer to use _in__the__past_ due to data corruption bugs
in older versions of reiser (specifically earlier reiser3 versions).
Reiser4 is so new that it hasn't gotten a shakedown, but since ext3 has
been out for years its well understood and has been time-tested.
Reiser3 has also been out for years and is well understood and tested.

Hans Reiser is an advocate of "everything is a file or directory," even
file metadata.  So, in his ideal world, a "file" would be a _directory_,
inside which would be a containing the actual data, but also many other
files that would contain the metadata about the "file" (file type
perhaps, permissions, attributes, etc).  This is probably why reiser
handles directories so efficiently.  This also puts him in conflict with
people who just don't care about his reiser-is-the-future-everything-
else-sucks attitude.

Dan