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Linux 6.10 Honors One Last ReiserFS Request Made By Hans Reiser
(www.phoronix.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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How petty - I'm surprised the kernel team allowed that crap in the first place. This should have been changed the day that murderer was convicted.
No need to change something if there's no reason to. A murderer of wife he may be, but that wouldn't change what happened in the project. It's also possible that since it wasn't all that popular outside of memes nobody even checked.
It's a readme. You don't need a huge reason to remove bs like this. Using documentation in the kernel source tree to air grievances shouldn't be allowed.
The primary job of the kernel maintainer is to be a technical gatekeeper, not a social one.
It is fine to have standards for submission, including asking things like READMEs to be free of politics. They could have rejected the original commit for that reason. Even these kinds of policies are difficult to apply uniformly and fairly.
That said, the original text was a bit mean spirited but pretty harmless, especially for people unfamiliar with the internal project drama. It looks a lot worse through the lens of knowing that he is a murderer.
What I asking is that it not become anybody’s job to retroactively edit the kernel history for social reasons. Why would this README need to be modified or removed after being accepted?
Who makes the decision for what gets changed and to what? For what reason? Should the project have changed the name of the filesystem once it was clear it was named after a murderer? Are we all complicit in that crime for having this code on our computers?
My point is exactly that the kernel is not a library.
Removing ReiserFS because of its lack of maintenance and future relevance is good kernel maintenance. Rewriting the README like it is a Wikipedia article is not.
It literally just was and for the same reasons I'm saying it should have been.
The kernel isn't a place to play politics. You can't just yank a component out like that on short notice, even if it has such a horrible story attached to it.
Back then, ReiserFS was mildly popular and its use would have been widespread (that includes me). The users of ReiserFS and probably even the other kernel devs had no idea that Hans Reiser was capable of such a crime. Infact, he was known as a computer prodigy back then.
There are plenty of users who don't have the luxury of migrating data on a short notice to a different filesystem. Disabling the filesystem would have left them high and dry. That's why the devs gave it a long deprecation period.
I didn't say to rip out the kernel module - just to reject or fix the README to be more appropriate. As you say - it's not a place to play politics and the original README did.
I'm saying what they just did should have been done a long time ago for the same reasons they did it now. It's not appropriate to air such crap in the source tree.
Happy to keep politics out of the kernel. It was a historical record. Let’s not 1984 the past.
Are you joking? It's a kernel not a library.
They removed it because it wasn't being maintained and because there are plenty of other actively developed options.
They didn't remove it because of any political reason or because he committed murder.