Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

Damn. I was enjoying not having to deal with the fun of ZFS and DKMS, but it seems like now bcachefs will be in the same boat, either dealing with DKMS and occasional breakage or sticking with the kernel version that slowly gets more and more out of date.

The article says that bcachefs is not being removed from the mainline kernel. This looks like mostly a workaround for Linus and other kernel devs to not have to deal with Kent directly.

It's complicated, no one really knows what "externally maintained" entails at the moment. Linus is not exactly poised to pull directly from Kent, and there is no solution lined-up at the moment.

Both Linus and Kent drive a hard bargain, and it's not as simple as finding someone else to blindly forward bcachefs patches. At the first sign of conflict, the poor person in the middle would have no power, no way to make anyone back down, and we'd be back to square one.

It's in limbo, and there is still time, but if left to bitrot it will be removed eventually.

That person would be accountable to Linus, but not to Kent.

Unfortunately, there's also nothing they can do if Kent says no. Say there's a disagreement on a patch that touches something outside fs/bcachefs, that person can't exactly write their own patches incorporating the feedback. They're not going to fork and maintain their own patches. They'd be stuck between a rock and a hard place, and that gets us back to a deadlock.

The issue is that I have never seen Kent back down a single time. Kent will explain in details why the rules are bullshit and don't apply in this particular case, every single time, without any room for compromise.

If the only problem was when to send patches, that would be one thing. But disagreements over patches aren't just a timing problem that can be routed around.

The key thing here is I've never challenged Linus's authority on patches outside fs/bcachefs/; I've quietly respun pull requests for that, on more than one occasion.

The point of contention here was a patch within fs/bcachefs/, which was repair code to make sure users didn't lose data.

If we can't have clear boundaries and delineations of responsibility, there really is no future for bcachefs in the kernel; my core mission is a rock solid commitment to reliability and robustness, including being responsive to issues users hit, and we've seen repeatedly that the kernel process does not share those priorities.

You may be right, but I think looking at it from a lens of who has authority and can impose their decision is still illustrating the point I'm trying to make.

To some extent drawing clear boundaries is good as a last resort when people cannot agree, but it can't be the main way to resolve disagreements. Thinking in terms of who owns what and has the final say is not the same as trying to understand the requirements from the other side to find a solution that works for everyone.

I don't think the right answer is to blindly follow whatever Linus or other people say. I don't mean you should automatically back down without technical reasons, because authority says so. But I notice I can't remember an email where concessions where made, or attemps to find a middle grounds by understanding the other side. Maybe someone can find counterexamples.

But this idea of using ownership to decide who has more authority and can impose their vision, that can't be the only way to collaborate. It really is uncompromising.

> To some extent drawing clear boundaries is good as a last resort when people cannot agree, but it can't be the main way to resolve disagreements. Thinking in terms of who owns what and has the final say is not the same as trying to understand the requirements from the other side to find a solution that works for everyone.

Agreed 100%. In an ideal world, we'd be sitting down together, figuring out what our shared priorities are, and working from there.

Unfortunately, that hasn't been possible, and I have no idea what Linus's priorities except that they definitely aren't a bulletproof filesystem and safeguarding user data; his response to journal_rewind demonstrated that quite definitively.

So that's where we're at, and given the history with other local filesystems I think I have good reason not to concede. I don't want to see bcachefs run off the rails, but given all the times I've talked about process and the way I'm doing things I think that's exactly what would happen if I started conceding on these points. It's my life's work, after all.

You'd think bcachefs's track record (e.g. bug tracker, syzbot) and the response it gets from users would be enough, but apparently not, sadly. But given the way the kernel burns people out and outright ejects them, not too surprising.