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You: 1) Appear to be the only one affected by it. 2) Don't have exact steps to reproduce it. This makes it very difficult for anybody apart from you to work o
by rlpb 14y ago
You:
1) Appear to be the only one affected by it.
2) Don't have exact steps to reproduce it.
This makes it very difficult for anybody apart from you to work on the issue.
> nothing has been done about it.
From the bug, it looks like lots has been done about it.
> This worries me.
I think this is justified for you, but has little bearing on others. Software projects are full of bugs that only appear to affect one person. These bugs make little progress but don't necessarily reflect on the general quality of the software. Admittedly it is more of a concern on something like a filesystem, but I am still skeptical.
- rwmj 14y ago(a) It's easy to reproduce. There are exact steps in the bug and in the mailing list thread. In fact, the steps are so simple I'll tell you what they are: (1) Run mkfs.btrfs, (2) Run any btrfs command on the filesystem. Put (1) + (2) into a shell script so they run immediately after each other. Put a loop around it so it tries over and over again. Bang => data corruption. (b) It's a data corrupter. That should be an immediate "stop everything" red flag (for a serious filesystem at least). Edit: Rereading this comment, I sound like I'm being very negative about btrfs. I just want to say that I really want btrfs to work, because it's based on very sound principles. I've also offered to help immediately testing any proposed patches for this bug.
- rlpb 14y ago> (a) It's easy to reproduce, if anyone had put any effort in at all. That's not the impression I get from the bug! I'm sure I read "difficult to reproduce". Perhaps it would help with attention if you made this absolutely clear?
- nnnnni 14y agoWait, why would you format the fs, do something with it, format the fs, do something with it, and so on? Isn't one pass enough?
- rwmj 14y agoBecause it's a test designed to reproduce a bug. We hit the bug all the time in libguestfs which spends much of its time formatting filesystems and immediately using them, but it doesn't happen 100% of the time. It's a race condition somewhere.
- cokernel_hacker 14y agoAs a professional storage engineer, your comment strikes my heart with horror. A reproducible bug that causes a crash/hang/loss of data in your file system in patently unacceptable. We labor to design a system that stores data safely to a stable medium. This is done while acknowledging that we are not perfect and cannot get everything right. HOWEVER, when we know that we have done something wrong and it can gravely affect a user, we do not ship. Ever. Period. "Software has bugs" is the lamest excuse to ship something with bugs. Do you think that pacemaker firmware leaves the factory floor with known bugs? I doubt it.