On Tue, 03 Sep 2013 19:59:06 -0400, Jeff Mahoney wrote:
Well that's the main thrust behind the "allow unsupported" module option. We have the feature set that we've evaluated to be mature and that's what we allow by default.
That seems a little counterintuitive to me. Allowing unsupported features would seem to indicate those features are immature, rather than mature. Am I missing something?
When I cast a wide net across forums and mailing lists last month asking for user experiences, I got a lot of uninformed opinion and very little concrete data.
Concrete data might be hard to come by, but I don't know that the way to get it is to risk new users' data (I assume upgrades wouldn't be affected - but is that a safe assumption?) to gather it. It needs to be an opt- in, not a default that's set that may result in users losing data.
Most of the negative data was in the area of snapper being too aggressive in creating snapshots and not aggressive enough in cleaning them up. There was some negative opinion WRT the file system itself, but most of it was in the realm of "I heard..." or "I don't trust it" based on too much hearsay and too little experience. It's that kind of rumor-response that is unhelpful in making decisions or improving the pain points with the file system. There were a few reports of people having troubles with the file system itself, but they tended to be with compression or RAID enabled -- the features that we don't entirely trust yet and want to disable so the casual user doesn't become an unwitting beta tester.
So whether it's "considered" unstable or experimental largely depends on what features are being tested and who's doing the testing. A lot of times it involves armchair punditry and no testing at all.
So for users to accept that their data is safe (or at least no less safe than it is with current - more mature - filesystems like ext4), don't set the default, but sell us on the idea. Tell us more about how the filesystem has improved, what the current outstanding issues are, and how they're being addressed. A lot of individuals aren't willing to test an unproven filesystem because of the risk to their data, or end up in a situation where the system has to be reinstalled. Myself, my openSUSE systems are my production work environment - so I need to be confident that I'm not going to lose critical data (which yes, I do back up the most critical data) and I'm not going to lose billable hours having to rebuild a system because the filesystem became inconsistent. I can certainly put it in a VM, but it's not going to get a thorough "real-world" workout there. OSS is all about transparency, so let's hear a little more about how btrfs has improved in the past 12-18 months. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org