Stephen Bennett posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Tue, 10 May 2005 16:36:57 +0100:
> On Tue, 2005-05-10 at 11:05 -0400, Alec Warner wrote: >> I'll be the first alt-arch person to scream, Reiser isn't stable on more >> than half the arch's we support, and forcing users to go to one >> filesystem just to get decent speed on portage tree searches is silly. > > Besides which, as of latested released kernels Reiser still doesn't have > working extended attributes, so SELinux systems can't mount it. Apparently > there's a patch kicking around, but forcing people to patch kernels > themselves is even sillier. Well, the latter anyway shouldn't be a big issue. That's what Gentoo ships patched kernels for, right? ... And as for not stable on various archs, that's what open source is for, right? (Leastwise I always see complaints from others and have complained myself about that being one of the problems with Java, not available in decently recent form on many archs because it's not open for those motivated enough to make it work, when those that /have/ the source refuse to do so, to do so themselves. Said as I (im)patiently wait for reiser4 to stabilize on amd64, because I regrettably don't have the skill set required to help get it there. =8^\) Anyway, I wasn't necessarily arguing for a flat portage dir tree, but simply pointing out that the problem of too many file/dir entries in a dir has a known and open source solution, therefore, that problem by itself isn't that big a deal. In practice, the flat-logical tree, organized by letter, would probably be easier to work with, because regardless of the ability of technology to handle the disk layout efficiently, humanity doesn't scale so fast, and more than a few hundred entries simply gets hard for the humans to work with, even if the file system has no problem with it. The file system problem may be solved, but the human problem is something else entirely (and tab completion doesn't work for /everything/). Thus, really what I'm saying is don't deal with the small, already solved stuff, when there's far larger unsolved problems -- if it's taken to be a flat dir layout, anyway -- that could be mentioned. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
