Linux 6.10 Honors One Last ReiserFS Request Made by Hans Reiser | Hacker News Reader

Linux 6.10 Honors One Last ReiserFS Request Made by Hans Reiser

phoronix.com

108 pointsmfiguiere33 comments

The original letter Hans sent was discussed here,

Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39042626) - Jan 2024 (438 comments)

At first, I wondered why the third person in the letter is missing from the diff, but a paragraph has already been there anyways: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

I'm glad to see he made that request, even from jail. Expressing magnanimity is a bit of freedom, in and of itself.

Is he not in there to be punished though?

No. Prison exists for incapacitation. It is to protect society from miscreants. If punishment and/or rehabilitation occurs, that is nice, but it is not it's purpose.

Are you making a specific distinction between prisons and penitentiaries?

Prisons have a variety of purposes, depending on who you ask.

To clarify, and to make it easier for anyone who wants to do further reading, I'll note that being in prison is punishment, and the purposes of punishment are variously deemed to be retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation.

(And prison only as incapacitation doesn't really make any sense given that prison terms differ based on the crime.)

Reiser's seeking eventual parole.

He may be expressing magnanimity, but a smart psychopath in his situation would act similarly, given the incentives involved.

One smart and controlled enough to do that probably won't kill anyone else at least, I guess?

Weird that

“Mikhail Gilula was a brilliant innovator who also left -in a destructive way that erased the value of his contributions, and -that he was shown much generosity just makes it more painful.“

was changed to:

“Mikhail Gilula was a brilliant innovator that has shown much generosity.”

Looks like the one making the change didn’t understate the original comments? They should have stopped at “brilliant innovator”

Yup, Mikhail ftw. He first was the recipient of generosity, an edit later he's being credited for that same generosity. Let's see if Reiser's newly found magnanimity will let this generous slip slide.

They wording was reversed, however; I took this to be an explicit and intended way of righting the scales for what had previously been written.

Think Jan Kara may have misread the part about generosity. But I imagine that’s okay.

Or they decided to specifically take that wording and reverse it as a form of poetic justice on the original complaint?

What dealing with filesystems will make you do is sobering. It's a cautionary tale.

Filesystems other than ZFS, anyway... ;)

That's true, only mkfs.xfs & mount is required, any tuning options are optional. Write to filesystem while cut host power, last written data is incomplete but filesystem is coming up. With zfs you will get good chance for loosing import pool and all created datasets and even all snapshots at once in that case, so send/receive server should have other power, usv is good for clean shutdown and even backup always good to know :-)

I have high hopes for Bcachefs.

Am I the only one with a whole heap of mixed feelings on someone doing something asked by someone incarcerated who is meant to be being punished for murdering his wife?

> meant to be being punished

Who is the punisher is important.

I don't feel strangers interacting with jailbirds and doing as they ask with repercussions unknown is smart. What if this is a jailbird messing with people on the outside? It's beyond what anybody should reasonably do.

Do you have a theory for why removing his own public criticism of his ex-colleagues could potentially be harmful or malicious?

To me, it comes across as a "I can still affect you even from in here", but I am extremely cynical when it comes to murderers.

The amount of press coverage that letter and granting his wishes got is completely unhealthy and still paints him as somewhat of a microcelebrity rather than a convicted murderer serving his sentence.

If family members want to interact with him, that's their own prerogative. Complete strangers? Utterly bizarre and completely inappropriate, IMO, especially to then carry out his instructions.

What in the fuck are people thinking?

At least for me, I'm thinking it's funny the way US people see prison vs "europeans". Punishing vs rehabilitation

That is a generalization. As someone in the US, my view is that prison _should_, in most cases have a goal of rehabilitation, but in practice, at least in the US is more often used only as punishment.

And I'm sure there are europeans who think that prison should only be for punishment.

I'm European and I had the same reaction

These were pretty much my exact thoughts while reading the story.

Brennan posting a novel-length letter to the LKML, one penned by a convicted murderer, was some questionable decisionmaking to say the least.

I sure am glad I'm not one of the (over a dozen) people mentioned in that email by name. I imagine that's profoundly disturbing. And that's before this butcher's micro-celebrity status propels his letter to the top spot when people Google your name. And I can only hope the victim's family is blissfully unaware of the exposure this."killing my wife and other social mistakes I made" tripe got.

Him being a convicted murderer doesn't make him any less of a human with basic dignity. He still had the achievements we used for years. Prison is not supposed to be a memory hole we throw people in forever. I'm happy to respect people who messed up lives, if they genuinely want to recover.

Nobody questioned the basic human dignity of Reiser, and nobody claimed that we should memory hole prisoners forever.

What was questioned was the good judgment of Brennan and the list moderators for posting Reiser's manifesto to LKML.

If getting your manifesto posted to LKML was a part of the basic standards of human dignity, California Health Care Facility would allow Reiser to post there himself. (And arguably LKML would not need moderators either - after all, declining a submission would violate basic human dignity.)

> it comes across as a "I can still affect you even from in here"

Sure sounds like degrading Reiser below what would be afforded to a random person who has restricted means of communication. I hope he can affect other people "even from in here". Humans are social and communicate.

> California Health Care Facility would allow Reiser to post there himself

While I don't know much about that specific facility, there's lots of issues with prisoner treatment already. Are you saying they're at a really high standard and should be the benchmark in this case? (Or that the US prison system reaches that level in general?)

I am not saying that human rights abuses don't happen in California prisons (inmate working conditions are a big problem, as is the state of solitary confinement).

But on the specific subject of public internet access, I'm almost certain that CHCF operates in full accordance with the relevant laws and ECtHR opinions -- which, by the way, explicitly state that access to the public internet is a matter in which prisons can and should exercise the strictest controls.

Wait, the thread is not about actual computer access. Of course public internet access will be regulated. I was originally replying about passing the message for him. Those are completely different things.

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