| HN Mirror

> All this talk about Oracle is just plain stupid. Oracle doesn't control anything, the community does. One core developer still works on Btrfs from Oracle, the vast majority of the contributions come from outside Oracle.

FWIW I haven't said anything about Oracle & btrfs ...

>> "Why Red Hat does not have engineers to support btrfs?"

> You have to understand how most kernel teams work across all companies. Kernel engineers work on what they want to work on, and companies hire the people working on the thing the company cares about to make sure they get their changes in.

> This means that the engineers have 95% of the power. Sure you can tell your kernel developer to go work on something else, but if they don't want to do that they'll just go to a different > company that will let them work on what they care about.

> This gives Red Hat 2 options. One is they hire existing Btrfs developers to come help do the work. That's unlikely to happen unless they get one of the new contributors, as all of the seasoned developers are not likely to move. The second is to develop the talent in-house. But again we're back at that "it's hard to tell kernel engineers what to do" problem. If nobody wants to work on it then there's not going to be anybody that will do it.

Sure, I understand many developers have their favorite area of development, and move to companies that will allow them to work on it. But surely some developers are willing to switch fields and start working on new challenges, and then there are new developers, of course. So it's not like the number of btrfs developers can't grow. It may take time to build the team, but they had several years to do that. Yet it didn't happen.

> And then there's the fact that Red Hat really does rely on the community to do the bulk of the heavy lifting for a lot of areas. BPF is a great example of this, cgroups is another good example.

I tend to see deprecation as the last state before removal of a feature. If that's the case, I don't see how community doing the heavy lifting makes any difference for btrfs in RH.

Or are you suggesting they may add it back once it gets ready for them? That's possible, but the truth is if btrfs is missing in RHEL (and derived distributions), that's a lot of users.

I don't know what are the development statistics, but if majority of btrfs developers works for Facebook (for example), I suppose they are working on improving areas important for Facebook. Some of that will overlap with use cases of RHEL users, some of it will be specific. So it likely means a slower pace of improvements relevant to RHEL users.

> Btrfs isn't ready for Red Hat's customer base, nobody who works on Btrfs will deny that fact. Does it make sense for Red Hat to pay a bunch of people to make things go faster when the community is doing the work at no cost to Red Hat?

The question is, how could it get ready for Red Hat's customer base, when there are no RH engineers working on it? Also, I assume the in-house developers are not there only to work on btrfs improvements, but also to investigate issues reported by customers. That's something you can't offload to the community.

I still think RH simply made a business decision, along the lines:

1) The btrfs possibly matters to X% of our paying customers, and some of them might leave if we deprecate it, costing us $Y.

2) In-house team of btrfs developers who would work on it and provide support to customers would cost $Z.

If $Y < $Z, deprecate btrfs.