[agartner]

I've been patiently waiting to convert my ZFS array to bcachefs. I'm very excited about better SSD promotion logic. But I'm not willing to spend any time on an experimental filesystem on my main systems.

> But you can expect to get flamed about running Debian, or perhaps more accurately, not being willing to spearhead Kent's crusade against Debian's Rust packaging policies.

It is quite unfortunate that Kent couldn't have just said "Debian isn't supported, we will revisit this when bcachefs is more stable" and stopped talking after that. Debian and experimental software just don't work well together.

[koverstreet]

Oh, the author's completely misrepresenting what happened here.

We had a major snafu with Debian, where a maintainer volunteered to package bcachefs-tools (this was not something I ever asked for!), and I explained that Debian policy on Rust dependencies would cause problems, and asked him not to do that.

But he did debundle, and then down the road he broke the build (by debundled bindgen and ignoring the minimum version we'd specified), and then _sat on it for months_, without even reporting the issue.

So Debian users weren't getting updates, and that meant they didn't get a critical bugfix that fixed passing of mount options.

Then a bunch of Debian users weren't able to mount in degraded mode when a drive died. And guess who was fielding bug reports?

After that is when I insisted that if bcachefs-tools is packaged for debian, dependencies don't get debundled.

If you're going to create a mess and drop it in my lap, and it results in users not able to access their filesystem, don't go around bitching about being asked to not repeat that.

[agartner]

Yeah just typical Debian stuff. jwz has been ranting about this for years. It's not worth spending any time on it.

Some suggestions:

- Only "supporting" the latest mainline kernel and latest tools. I prefer to point to CI system configurations to show exactly what it "supported"

- Make this clear via your website and a pinned issue on Github.

- Force users to report the versions they use via an issue template: https://docs.github.com/en/communities/using-templates-to-en.... Immediately close any issues not meeting your version/system requirements without further discussion or thought.

[kstrauser]

That last one’s great advice. I don’t remember if you can use checkboxes there and I’m too lazy to look at the moment, but I could imagine the first question being:

  [ ] I am using Debian packages

and auto-closing if set.

[andrewshadura]

Do you ever admit you're wrong?

[koverstreet]

I think I did once back in 2002.

[hinkley]

I seem to recall a previous fs creator with ego problems was tried and convicted of murder, and then his work unceremoniously disappeared into an oubliette.

I’m 99% sure you’re joking but as an outsider I have… concerns.

[koverstreet]

It does help to have a sense of humor :)

[DogRunner]

That was a good one! Keep up your humor. It's a tough environment out there.

[bartvk]

Genuinly curious: it seems like you are making a remark on his character, right? But why did you do so? Just fed up? Or did he actually state something wrong in the parent comment?

[ThatPlayer]

I've been running bcachefs on my spare dedicated SteamOS gaming machine for fun. Especially for the SSD promotion logic. It's a spare computer with an old 128GB SSD and 3TB HDD that I've got as a single filesystem. I love not having to manage games between the SSD/HDD. Too bad it's a mITX build with no space for more old drives I could stick in.