Re: Progress on a "spiritual" derivation of GoboLinux

On 3 May 2013 13:19, Ben Francis <[email protected]> wrote:
> Kernel developer and filesystem guru Ted Ts'o gave a presentation at POSSCON
> saying  it takes around 150-200 person-years of smart developer time to make
> a quality file system.
>
> Why? Because filesystems are hard. http://lwn.net/Articles/370419/
>
> The ZFS team recently completed their work: 20+ devs working for seven years
> straight, and btrfs is still not production ready. The failure of WinFS is
> Bill Gates' biggest regret.
>
> I applaud your willingness to investigate and hack, Transwire. A filesystem
> layout's main task is Separation of Concerns. Gobolinux does this
> brilliantly with backward compatibility to  legacy programs. Its system of
> hidden symlinks can probably accomplish your goals without changing the
> filesystem hierarchy
> standard, and definitely easier than creating a new filesystem.
>
> It's fun to think about, though!

While I am sure that you are correct in every way, I think that you
are conflating two different things here, Ben.

One is the filesystem, meaning the on-disk format, and the other is
the layout, the arrangement of files in folders.

It's a bit like comparing the number and shape of the pieces of a
jigsaw puzzle with the material on which it's printed. A different
Linux directory layout can be implemented on any disk format from ext2
to btrfs; the one has got no impact on the other.

OTOH, if your point was the amount of time and effort it takes to get
it right, well, I suspect that those are more comparable. Plans always
have mistakes and need amendment, which is the main reason I'd be
resistant to proposals to scrap & redo the Gobo layout - it's been
around for years and has withstood 14 revisions. The big bugs should
be worked out and expunged from it by now. A new layout will bring new
bugs.

--
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