[Mailman-Developers] Requirements for a new archiver

[Brad Knowles]

At 8:35 PM -0800 2003/10/29, Peter C. Norton wrote:

>  [ A cursory google search indicates that hashed dirs, extents, and
>  journalling are all in linux xfs.  I can't imagine an unsupported
>  feature making its way into the filesystem that SGI is putting on its
>  latest and greatest systems, but if you know about this, please share ]

	My understanding is that the port of XFS to Linux was only about 
70% done at the time the critical software engineers were laid off by 
SGI, and that no further work in this area has been done.  Maybe the 
features are supposedly there but incomplete.

>  However reiserfs was built to handle a mix of lots of small files, ala
>  maildir or mh spools.

	I'm sorry, I don't trust ReiserFS at all.  I'd trust XFS if it 
was on Irix, or IBMs JFS, but not ReiserFS.  Hell, on a Linux system, 
I'd use ext2fs before I'd use Reiser.

>  I'm not too current on current bsd going-ons, but I'd bet that ffs2
>  has something to offer in this arena, too, since it looks like it
>  almost does extent-based allocation now.

	No, not yet.  There are improvements in the areas of handling 
synchronous meta-data updates, background fsck, etc... but nothing 
like extent-based filesystems or integrated hashed directory schemes, 
etc....

>  Err... then to relate this to a prior post, why not just use maildirs
>  on filesystems that are engineered to handle that sort of thing?

	Because we can't guarantee that everyone (or anyone) would be 
willing/able to use the selected filesystems that we have blessed? 
You think requiring everyone to install PostgreSQL would be bad, do 
you really want to try to force them all to use ReiserFS on Linux as 
their only supported option?

>  Unless you are using a filesystem that works for this, right?  Like
>  xfs, vxfs, reiserfs, and probably ffs2.  I believe that linux's ext3
>  has support for hashing directories (or soon will - I don't precisely
>  know as I've been focusing on other things)

	My understanding is that ext3fs is dead.  The work that Stephen 
Tweedie had been doing stopped long ago, and even then it was only a 
minor tweak over ext2fs.  I don't believe that this work has been 
picked up again or extended to include other features.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

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