Re: [RFC 0/13] extents and 48bit ext3

On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 10:30:06AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> And I'm not saying that just because it's a filesystem, and people get 
> upset if they lose data. No, I'm saying it because from a maintenance 
> standpoint, such a filesystem has almost zero cost.

One of the costs (and I'm not disagreeing with your main point;
I think forking ext3 to ext4 at this point is reasonable), is that
bugfixes applied to one don't necessarily get applied to the other.
I found some recently between ext2 and ext3, and submitted those, but I
only audited one file.  There's lots more to look at and I just haven't
found the time recently.  Going to three variations is a lot more work
for auditing, and it might be worth splitting some bits which genuinely
are the same into common code.