Re: [GIT PULL] Ext3 removal, quota & udf fixes

From: Raymond Jennings
Date: Mon Aug 31 2015 - 20:24:36 EST


On 08/31/15 15:31, Raymond Jennings wrote:
On 08/31/15 14:37, Linus Torvalds wrote:
On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 11:19 PM, Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> wrote:
The biggest change in the pull is the removal of ext3 filesystem driver
(~28k lines removed).
I really am not ready to just remove ext3 without a lot of good
arguments. There might well be people who this use ext3 as ext3, and
don't want to update. I want more a rationale for removal than "ext4
can read old ext3 filesystems".
I actually would agree that having two drivers for the same filesystem is redundant and unneeded code duplication.

That said, I wouldn't mind myself if the ext4 driver were given a very grueling regression test to make sure it can actually handle old ext3 systems as well as the ext3 driver can. Just gutting an entire driver because another driver can handle it only makes sense if nothing can go wrong and the potential for causing regressions is quite obvious.

I think also that we should remove the ext2 driver before we remove the ext3 driver.

My two cents.
Just to ask a general opinion:

Am I right that it's ok for kernel code to be organized how we (the developers) see fit as long as we don't break userspace or hardware in the process?

So long as we function properly, should userspace care about how our source code is structured?

I'm thinking yes, but it might be fruitful to see an answer archived on the list.
Linus
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