On Sun, 2003-04-13 at 20:29, Nicholas Parsons wrote:
So, is ext3/ext2 the standard file system for GNU/linux?
I don't believe you can speak of a standard. The "vanilla" kernel has several file systems, and they're all interoperable, in the sense that a file stored on one system can be moved to another without alteration.
If so, why spend so much time developing other kinds of filesystems like Reiser FS, XFS, JFS?
One file system is good at one thing, another are good at different things. Hans Reiser & co. have very specific ideas on how to develop a file system, the people at SGI have different ideas and their experiences with high performance graphics systems has evolved into present day XFS.
A file system is critical to any operating system and I think it would be much better if everyone could just focus their efforts on improving one file system. This is the case with MS Windows. They started out with FAT, then moved on to FAT32 and finally are using NTFS. The same goes for other stuff in the open source community like KDE and Gnome for example. This "multiplicity" approach hurts linux as a whole. Linux software as a whole should not compete against other linux software but should compete against other OS's software.
Head down to your local library and check out a book called "On the origin of species" by Charles Darwin. It may not be on the comp.sci. curriculum yet, but it should be.