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The way the BCacheFS situation has been playing out is a tragedy. I had very high hopes for it.

InsideOutSanta 1y ago
Yeah, this all seems so unnecessary. I hope Kent can either figure out how to work in the context of a larger team or find somebody who can do it on his behalf.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  > Once the BCacheFS maintainer behaves [...] So, there are still behavioral issues here I take it? That is a bummer. This is not news to me, but I thought the situation has changed ever since.
  - motorest 1y ago
    > So, there are still behavioral issues here I take it? From the past discussion, it's mainly grave behavioral issues but they also end up being technical. Such as trying to push new untested features into RCs and breaking builds, and resorting to flame wars to push these problematic patches forward instead of actually working them out with maintainers. But yeah, the final straw was a very abusive email sent to a maintainer in the mailing list.
    - koverstreet 1y ago
      ...Where are you getting this stuff? Seriously, every time I read tales about all the horrific things I've done in the kernel community, the stories grow and get wilder and wilder. Oh wait. It's you.
      - johnisgood 1y ago
        That is just people for you. My advice would be to not let them prompt you to leave such comments because it will appear to confirm what they are saying.
        koverstreet 1y ago
        In my experience, the trolls never go away unless you start poking at them to point out how ridiculous and laughable they are.
      - InsideOutSanta 1y ago
        One thing I've learned over 40 years of working in software development is that it is often more effective to collaborate productively with others than to be right. Maybe Linus's rules for what can be merged at what point are bad, but you're not going to change his mind. So even if you were right all along, the outcome is that people are screwed because bcachefs is no longer maintained in the kernel. Every day, I ask myself, do I want to be right, or do I want to be effective?
        koverstreet 1y ago
        That attitude is how you get ahead as an individual at the expense of our whole field. That's how you end up with decisionmaking that's nothing more than popularity contests and no one even bothering to do the analysis on which option is technically better. That way leads the death of leadership. If you want to accomplish something as challenging as a filesystem, you do it by consistently making the right call and sticking to it, over and over and over. And if you keep doing that, eventually you end up with the most active filesystem community around, and the ability to flip even the kernel community the bird when their weaponized incompetence becomes too much :)
- Voultapher 1y ago
  Don't hold your breath. I've approached Kent two weeks ago and offered to help upstream changes into the kernel so he wouldn't have to interact with any of the kernel people ... he claimed without being able to explain why that having a go-between couldn't possibly help and that if he couldn't dictate the kernel release schedule he wouldn't want to ship the software anyway. And then proceeded to dunk on btrfs.
  - yencabulator 1y ago
    Totally expecting to see bcacheos next. (Then maybe down the line people will realize Linus had a heart of gold behind his foul mouth.)
johnisgood 1y ago
Same. I liked many of its features (actually, all features, see https://bcachefs.org https://bcachefs.org) and I was waiting for it to become usable, but I guess that day will never come now? So, the alternative is ZFS only, maybe HAMMER2. HAMMER2 does not look too bad either, except you need DragonflyBSD for that.
- ThatPlayer 1y ago
  It's not unusable, I use it on a spare computer for fun, cuz I want tiering of SSD + HDDs. And this doesn't mean development has stopped, just not done in the kernel.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    True, I did not mean to say usable, I meant to say that "officially supported", but I will give it a go with a custom built kernel sooner or later. For how long have you been using it? Any issues? Any favorite feature(s) in particular?
    - ThatPlayer 1y ago
      I've been using it about a year or so. Like I said, the 'killer feature' for me is tiering. I'm not using it on my main computer, but a spare parts computer with whatever storage I have laying around thrown into it, so being able to combine a 3TB HDD with a 1/2 TB SSD. All the storage stays usable, and I get better performance. Not perfect though. Performance at times doesn't seem better than just SSD, though I didn't really test that and I'm not sure if it's just hitting the HDD at those times. And there was a kernel version that didn't boot, though I'm staying on the bleeding edge with Arch Linux.
- ahartmetz 1y ago
  What I expect to happen is that bcachefs stabilizes outside of mainline, and after that, it can be merged back because no large patches = not much drama potential.
  - 1y ago

Yeah, this all seems so unnecessary. I hope Kent can either figure out how to work in the context of a larger team or find somebody who can do it on his behalf.

johnisgood 1y ago
> Once the BCacheFS maintainer behaves [...] So, there are still behavioral issues here I take it? That is a bummer. This is not news to me, but I thought the situation has changed ever since.
- motorest 1y ago
  > So, there are still behavioral issues here I take it? From the past discussion, it's mainly grave behavioral issues but they also end up being technical. Such as trying to push new untested features into RCs and breaking builds, and resorting to flame wars to push these problematic patches forward instead of actually working them out with maintainers. But yeah, the final straw was a very abusive email sent to a maintainer in the mailing list.
  - koverstreet 1y ago
    ...Where are you getting this stuff? Seriously, every time I read tales about all the horrific things I've done in the kernel community, the stories grow and get wilder and wilder. Oh wait. It's you.
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      That is just people for you. My advice would be to not let them prompt you to leave such comments because it will appear to confirm what they are saying.
      - koverstreet 1y ago
        In my experience, the trolls never go away unless you start poking at them to point out how ridiculous and laughable they are.
    - InsideOutSanta 1y ago
      One thing I've learned over 40 years of working in software development is that it is often more effective to collaborate productively with others than to be right. Maybe Linus's rules for what can be merged at what point are bad, but you're not going to change his mind. So even if you were right all along, the outcome is that people are screwed because bcachefs is no longer maintained in the kernel. Every day, I ask myself, do I want to be right, or do I want to be effective?
      - koverstreet 1y ago
        That attitude is how you get ahead as an individual at the expense of our whole field. That's how you end up with decisionmaking that's nothing more than popularity contests and no one even bothering to do the analysis on which option is technically better. That way leads the death of leadership. If you want to accomplish something as challenging as a filesystem, you do it by consistently making the right call and sticking to it, over and over and over. And if you keep doing that, eventually you end up with the most active filesystem community around, and the ability to flip even the kernel community the bird when their weaponized incompetence becomes too much :)
Voultapher 1y ago
Don't hold your breath. I've approached Kent two weeks ago and offered to help upstream changes into the kernel so he wouldn't have to interact with any of the kernel people ... he claimed without being able to explain why that having a go-between couldn't possibly help and that if he couldn't dictate the kernel release schedule he wouldn't want to ship the software anyway. And then proceeded to dunk on btrfs.
- yencabulator 1y ago
  Totally expecting to see bcacheos next. (Then maybe down the line people will realize Linus had a heart of gold behind his foul mouth.)

johnisgood 1y ago

Same. I liked many of its features (actually, all features, see https://bcachefs.org https://bcachefs.org) and I was waiting for it to become usable, but I guess that day will never come now? So, the alternative is ZFS only, maybe HAMMER2. HAMMER2 does not look too bad either, except you need DragonflyBSD for that.

ThatPlayer 1y ago
It's not unusable, I use it on a spare computer for fun, cuz I want tiering of SSD + HDDs. And this doesn't mean development has stopped, just not done in the kernel.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  True, I did not mean to say usable, I meant to say that "officially supported", but I will give it a go with a custom built kernel sooner or later. For how long have you been using it? Any issues? Any favorite feature(s) in particular?
  - ThatPlayer 1y ago
    I've been using it about a year or so. Like I said, the 'killer feature' for me is tiering. I'm not using it on my main computer, but a spare parts computer with whatever storage I have laying around thrown into it, so being able to combine a 3TB HDD with a 1/2 TB SSD. All the storage stays usable, and I get better performance. Not perfect though. Performance at times doesn't seem better than just SSD, though I didn't really test that and I'm not sure if it's just hitting the HDD at those times. And there was a kernel version that didn't boot, though I'm staying on the bleeding edge with Arch Linux.
ahartmetz 1y ago
What I expect to happen is that bcachefs stabilizes outside of mainline, and after that, it can be merged back because no large patches = not much drama potential.
- 1y ago