Re: [PATCH 1/5] Forking ext4 filesystem from ext3 filesystem

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Thu Aug 10 2006 - 14:20:11 EST


On Thu, 10 Aug 2006 09:41:59 -0700
Mingming Cao <cmm@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 09 Aug 2006 18:17:02 -0700
> > Mingming Cao <cmm@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Fork(copy) ext4 filesystem from ext3 filesystem. Rename all functions in ext4 from ext3_xxx() to ext4_xxx().
> >
> >
> > It would have been nice to spend a few hours cleaning up ext3 and JBD
> > before doing this. The code isn't toooo bad, but there are number of
> > coding style problems, whitespace screwups, incorrect comments, missing
> > comments, poorly-chosen variable names and all of that sort of thing.
> >
> > One the fs has been copied-and-pasted, it's much harder to address these
> > things: either need to do it twice, or allow the filesystems to diverge, or
> > not do it.
> >
> Andrew, thanks for taking a close look this series of changes.
>
> I agree with you that the timing is right, to do the clean up now rather
> than later. I would give it a try. If I could get more help from more
> code reviewer, it probably makes the effort a lot easier. For those
> issues you pointed out : coding style problem___incorrect comments,
> poorly-named variables -- do you have any specific examples in your mind?

Not really, apart from the few things I identified elsewhere (such as the
brelse thing).

It's just that now is the right time for a general spring-cleaning, if we
ever want to do that.

> > Also, -mm presently has two patches pending against fs/jbd/ and nine pending
> > against fs/ext3/. We should get all those things merged before taking the
> > copy.
> >
> So probably the right thing to do is keep the ext4 patches against mm
> tree instead of rc three?

That would drive everyone nuts, I think. What I would suggest is:

- get ext3 into a ready-to-copy state (merge bugfixes, spring-clean, etc)

- do the big copy-n-rename operation in Linus's tree.

- run a quilt or git tree against the resulting Linus tree.

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/