Grr! <rant>

[Don Flynn]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2001, Adam McDougall wrote:

> For FreeBSD, the only plans I have heard about are souping up ffs (ufs) to
> be fsck-less and be more safe during sudden power loss, as well as
> supporting snapshots and maybe some other neat stuff.  I'm pretty syre

     Doesn't being 'fsck-less' and 'more safe during sudden power loss' 
sound like the goal of a journalling FS to you? 0-)  From what I'm given
to understand that was the point behind soft updates, to provide an
alternative to a JFS.  Kinda like the perl motto 'more than one way to do
it' or something. 

> NetBSD has a semi-functional LFS (Logging File System) but I haven't
> looked to see if its production quality yet.  I think we probably wont see

     Actually, LFS was defined as part of 4.4 BSD or at least was given
its very own chapter in 'The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD
Operating System'.  I can't remember the publish date on that book and its
not in front of me now, but I think what happened with LFS was that they
ran into a really pernicious problem and development halted on it.  NetBSD
recently started development on it again in an attempt to solve those
problems.  Everything I've seen labels LFS as 'EXPERIMENTAL', so I
wouldn't put it into production. I took a quick jaunt through some of my
BSD systems and noticed that the latest OpenBSD still has the kernel
option for LFS, its absent in FreeBSD and appears to be missing in BSD/OS
as well.  Now, I know LFS has been in BSD/OS before and my version is
lagging a bit behind the latest release, so if I see it reappear when I
upgrade I guess that's a good indication of what direction they're taking.

> up.  I believe someone named Terry Lambert has ported JFS to FreeBSD
> and/or FreeBSD to something that uses JFS (cant remember which) but he is
> disenchanted by people's reluctance to accept code officially into
> products just based on their technical accomplishments.  Unfortunately
> some code gets rejected due to bad coding style and sometimes bad author
> attitude instead of cleaned up :/

     That will probably be the sticking point with most of the *BSDs -
something political. A couple of the project's charters prohibit them from
including any software in their 'core' if its liscense is more restrictive
than the BSD liscense.  I can't recall, but are XFS and JFS released under
GPL?  Of course, BSD/OS wouldn't necessarily be inhibited by GPL
liscensing issues.

--
"Is that sound you're hearing the trumpeting of St. Peter's angels
 or the screams of Memnoch's tortured souls?"
Don Flynn        djf2@ili.net                   Sayge@IRC