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Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

The premise of this post is incorrect.

ReiserFS stuck around for almost two decades after his crime. The reason it’s being removed has very little to do with his crime and more to do with the stability and maintenance capabilities of it.

For reference, his wife was missing in 2006. He was prosecuted in 2008. It was deprecated in 2022 and scheduled to be removed in 2025.

How does someone believe that it’s due to his history when there’s been almost twenty years of grace?

The reason for removal has been very clear by the Linux maintainers.

There was a consensus among upstream kernel developers to deprecate ReiserFS given that there are no notable users of it any longer, the code is barely maintained, and no legitimate reasons have been found to user ReiserFS over any of the modern alternatives like EXT4, XFS, Btrfs, F2FS, etc.

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That's not entirely fair, being included in the trunk of linux for a long time is normal even if something is unused... I know people were avoiding ReiserFS because of its indeterminate future in the backtrack linux 2.0 days (March 2007).

It's a cart and horse problem, nobody wants to use it because they think there's no investment, since developing it could be seen outside as being an indemnification of the person.

Lack of use means that less people even want to invest in developing it further, making it take a back seat, which then leads to even fewer scenarios where it's used, because it's not competitive, and so on.

The Linux kernel rarely removes stuff. This is not something that should be taken as a measure of support; If we want to track reiserFS properly we must follow the commits before prosecution and after, along with some usage trends would paint a real picture.

There's a whole host of dead things in Linux (AFS, which even Apple doesn't support for nearly 2 decades) that isn't removed yet.

I can’t find a reference to a filesystem called AFS. Would you have a link?

As far as I know there was Macintosh File System (MFS) which was replaced by HFS/+ and finally APFS.

But ReiserFS was also infamous for its difficult to maintain nature at the time of its inclusion. Linus himself was against a lot of aspects of it. They capitulated to community pressure to include it, but it was always going to be a project with a high bus factor regardless of his crime.

No problem mate, it's a terrible name to google, I understand.

Here it is, the service is called "AFS": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol

Ah the SMB alternative. Okay yes I’m familiar with that.

Unfortunately it was still frequently in use 10 years ago on Apple systems (particularly the time capsule which was only discontinued in 2018) , and there are derivatives in use today. So I’m not sure it’s an apt comparison point.

The Wikipedia article actually links to implementations like netatalk that have updates as recently as a couple months ago. So it is actively maintained beyond what ReiserFS has.

netatalk and AFS are similar but truly not the same, netatalk in linux does not afaik have an actual kernel driver.

AFS however, does, and I was doing MacOS sysadmin work in 2011 and it was strongly discouraged to use anything other than SMB, which frustrated me because samba3 was a pain and I considered SMB a windows technology at the time.

The time capsule as you mention also discontinued the usage of AFS after the first version (I actually have 3 at home right now still, a 1st gen, 2nd gen and last gen - the tall one).

AFS's use today, not sure, but as mentioned, 13 years ago at least it was strongly discourage by Apple themselves.

AFP was still the default though in 2012. And even though you weren’t able to provision new time capsules to communicate over AFP, it was still supported.

I’d bet there’s a significantly larger set of devices active at any given time during the existence of ReiserFS to today that still use AFP.

And I’ll point to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42101313 that says AFP has no kernel support, but something else called Andrew File System does.

Well, the "simple, incomplete" Andrew Filesystem is actually an even better example then, as it cannot possibly have users as it's incomplete but has been in Linux since 2004.

AFS, the Andrew File System, has kernel support. [0]

AFP, the Apple Filing Protocol, is a network protocol, not a filesystem. It has several userspace implementations. [1]

AFS, the Apple File Service, is AFP plus other auxiliary protocols. [1]

APFS, the Apple File System used in modern MacOS, has read only support in userspace, and there is work on a read/write kernel module that is not mainlined. [2] [4]

HFS, the Hierarchical File System used in older MacOS, has mainline kernel support. [3]

[0] https://docs.kernel.org/filesystems/afs.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System

[3] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.8/filesystems/hfs.html

[4] https://github.com/linux-apfs/linux-apfs-rw

Thanks. These are great reference links.

The episode does not say it's being removed because of his crime.

If it seems to imply that, then that is a mistake I've made, as is not the intention.

Fair enough, though I think that even if you don’t explicitly say it, the whole Artist vs Art framing only leaves that interpretation. As can be seen by the rest of the responses here.

I think cmiller below nailed what I was trying to draw attention to:

    My takeaway was that Han's problems were intrinsically tied to the both the architecture and code in ways that made it difficult for others to contribute and fix. The artist's influence on the art caused its ultimate demise.

So is about art and artist, but no causation implied with Linux depreciation and the murder, but I get how people might think that.

But also I just wanted to share the story with those who may not have heard it.

i still use reiserfs - i can store more tiny files than the others. I was disappointed when testing Btrfs as it used more space and became corrupted easier, even when using compression.

When you tested?

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