Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (626 mails)

[Gerald Pfeifer <gp@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 25 Feb 2008, Per Jessen wrote:
> Well, the thing is that you left the door open, whereas Marcus slammed 
> it shut.  I can't argue against a plain and unequivocal decision made by 
> product management, whereas I can argue against a list of arguments :-)

:-)  And you're welcome to!  Feedback and discussion are good, but
I will also try to be more explicit about unequivocally done deals
in the future.

> > However, ext3 is the primary file system used by many if not most
> > other distributions and we surely wnat that level of compatibility. 
> That's a novel point - what compatibility are we talking about?

Being able to use (most) filesystems created by other distros, create 
filesystems for use by other distros, and specifically to allow for 
sharing filesystems in dual boot and similar situations.  ext3 here
is the common demonitator among Linux distributions.

> If we're looking at new or relatively new users, they may be likely
> to switch from one distro to another, but as a distro-provider, do
> you really want to encourage that?

Well, we surely want to encourage folks to switch _to_ openSUSE. ;-)

> What I'd like to understand is - why are you getting requests for XFS
> when it's already there?

It's not requests to *add* XFS support, but feedback from openSUSE users,
developers and supporters, both in house and externally, partners, and 
customers (on the SLE side) how they use and appreciate XFS support
especially since it is something few other distros offer, and none at 
the level we do.

On the contrary, when it comes to JFS it's only been a handful of, 
admittedly very vocal ;-), users pushing for it.

> As it happens I mostly agree, but don't wave your flag of "openSUSE 
> kernel level support" when it's so difficult to come by anyway.

I beg to disagree in that I have seen ReiserFS issues and other critical 
kernel issues which affect a larger number of users addressed very 
quickly.  Obviously this is the easier to do the more knowledge we
have among openSUSE contributors (which, on the kernel side, mainly
boils down to Novell engineers, sadly).

> In my opinion, Novell is mixing openSUSE and SLES a little too much. The 
> level of support is obviously different - as it should be - but to omit 
> support for <something> from openSUSE just because you are not prepared 
> to offer the required level of support for SLES, that's not in the 
> interest of the openSUSE community, IMHO.

This is not what I wrote.  The string "SLES" does not even appear below.

==== quote ====
You're right that the level of "support" the openSUSE development
community provides widely varies among different components.

Data loss or, worse, data corruption, are usually considered quite
critical so we do want to be a bit more cautious on this front and
this is why, for example, YaST issues a warning when setting up a
JFS volume whereas we certainly don't do this when a user chooses
one of the many secondary window environments in openSUSE.

We have engineers on staff and/or tight partnerships who are closely
familiar with ext3, ReiserFS, and XFS and thus can and readily do
address issues with these three.  This is not the case for JFS.
==== quote ====


Gerald
-- 
Dr. Gerald Pfeifer            E gp@xxxxxxxxxx      SUSE Linux Products GmbH
Director Inbound Product Mgmt  T +49(911)74053-0    HRB 16746 (AG Nuremberg)
openSUSE/SUSE Linux Enterprise  F +49(911)74053-483  GF: Markus Rex
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