Andrej Podzimek wrote: > 1) Btrfs does not have mature and user-friendly command-line > tools. AFAIK, you can only list your snapshots and subvolumes by > grep'ing the tree dump. ;-)
I haven't looked closely at the btrfs commands recently, but from what I've seen, they're really amazingly ugly. The worst sort of parameter-ridden, fiddly, picky, completely non-mnemonic unix commands. And I think that's a huge, huge drawback - more than most people think. The traditional hacker mindset is to leave such nicities as usable commands to last, if ever. "If it was hard to write, it should be hard to use!" seems to be the philosophy. I think that attitude really misses the point that even geeks are humans too, and even experienced unix admins hate really complex commands. I, for one, can say without a doubt that the simplicity and elegance of the ZFS commands was one of the major selling points. Might I have eventually been persuaded to use ZFS based just on its features alone? Maybe. But I would have been dragged kicking and screaming, not wanting to learn Yet Another Set of Incomprehensible Commands. If I had started reading the man page and immediately been lost in a sea of parameters and sixteen different interrelated commands, I wonder if I would even have bothered pursuing it, or if I would have just put it in the "could be interesting, maybe I'll look at it someday" category. One of the main reasons I love ZFS so much is because I hated Veritas so much, and one of the reasons I hated Veritas so much was because doing even the smallest thing required a cheat sheet ten pages long. I never really felt like I "got" Veritas - I just followed cryptic recipes given to me by other people. But ZFS... I grok ZFS. Partly because of its design elegance, partly because the volume manager layer is gone, but largely because I can understand the commands. I'll never forget the excitement I felt when I saw the video of at opensolaris.org demonstrating how simple the commands were. I'll never forget how happy I was when I tried it the first time and, damn - it worked! *That* easy! I was ecstatic. If btrfs doesn't *seriously* brush up its commands, I'll probably be very resistant to learning it. At my age and with my level of free time, learning another super-complex set of computer commands just isn't exactly high on my list. But I do have a great idea of how to improve the situation. Here's my suggestion for btrfs: First, rename it BFS and just get rid of the silly, clumsy acronym and fudged pronunciation. No one cares that it's it's b-tree or whatever. Second, and most importantly, BFS should STEAL ZFS'S COMMND SYNTAX, AS VERBATIM AS POSSIBLE. Why not? It's already well-designed and easy. Lots of people already know it. Copyright? Well, the ZFS license might have technical issues with the code itself, but I don't think there would be any legal restriction to simply stealing the names of the commands and their syntax. Rename "zpool" to "bpool", rename "zfs to bfs", and - voila! the problem of arcane syntax is gone. I can't see Oracle dragging anyone into court and trying to sue for copying some command syntax. OK, of course I realize it wouldn't be that simple and that a fair amount of coding would be involved. But it would be interface and parsing code, not the heavy-duty black magic. More-junior developers could handle it while the more senior ones kept working on functionality. That's my idea, and I think it's brilliant. :) My $0.02. Doug Linder ---------- Learn more about Merchant Link at www.merchantlink.com. THIS MESSAGE IS CONFIDENTIAL. This e-mail message and any attachments are proprietary and confidential information intended only for the use of the recipient(s) named above. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not print, distribute, or copy this message or any attachments. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender by return e-mail and delete this message and any attachments from your computer. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
