[bjourne]

Implicit in Wilcox e-mail is the claim that there is a non-trivial cost of keeping reiserfs even when it is not being updated. Cost of keeping resierfs in the kernel > Cost of removing it. A filesystem is like a plugin for the kernel. In theory, it doesn't care what filesystem you use because it only access it using a common plugin interface. So keeping reiserfs in the kernel should cost 0. In practice, the cost is higher. Young developers often don't understand that. Plugins, extensions, modules, backends, what have you, no matter how great the extension mechanism is, you can't completely eliminate the costs.

[samus]

In this case, ReiserFS was actually complicating an interface. But interestingly, a patch to resolve just that was published as a follow-up to the message this is all about.