Hacker News Reader

Maybe then you should have considered this file system as truly experimental and expected your end users to make frequent backups. And advertise it as such. You could also have some kind of dkms bleeding edge module for your users to test fixes before they reach the kernel.

This way you wouldn’t be so preoccupied about getting code as fast as possible in the kernel.

View on HN

No, a lot of bcachefs users are explicitly using it because of data loss, and they needed something more reliable; that's bcachefs's main reason for existing.

Besides that, if you want to make anything truly reliable, you have to prioritize reliability at every step in the process of building it. That means actively supporting it, getting feedback and making sure it's working well, and you can't do that without shipping bugfixes.

Having to ship a DKMS module just so users can get the latest bugfixes would be nutso - that's just not how things are done.

Some distributions do release hotfixes before they reach mainline kernel. If you expect end users to compile Linus’ kernel head, why couldn’t they compile your branch though ? They get timely fixes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com