On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 2:21 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
In terms of crash worthyness, ext2 was better.  I think the ext2 people
took the approach that they wanted to be as robust as dos but with
performance.  And they made it, it's some very nice work.
​Fair enough - It never seems from the outside a much different and when I was working with it, it was just enough different that all of the tools (like BSD backup/restore) broke.​

Having personally worked on fsck v6/v7 at CMU and Kirk reimplementing it with BSD, I had a fairly strong sense of "keep the tools" working.  I actually hated SysV's FSDB, but could use it.   Kirk and Sam reimplemented dump/restore but kept the "script" level interface pretty much as is.

So, here come linux and the only part of file kits that still works is part of the user space stuff (ls, tar, cp).   But beyond that it is all different.   Ted/Steve eventually did do a fsck-like thing for ext2 fairly quickly, but nothing else - so that was part of my comment about "gratuitous changes."  Why because by 1991 when linux comes into my house, I have a set of other UNIX systems at home running and here it is I have to have different tools for this new linux box.   grumble...

 

Nope.  And I sort of made my name working on FFS with srk, I'm a fan of
what FFS/UFS could do but ext2 went way way further. 
​Fair enough...​


 
And did so pretty
quickly, far more quickly than any of the Unix shops would have done,
they were more cautious.
​Agreed, although I always thought megasafe (advfs) was pretty cool and have had fairly good experiences with XFS after SGI let it out to other folks (still run it on my linux based NAS box truth known) .  As I said, my main complaint against ext2 was when I first encountered it none of the BSD FS tools worked and that ticked me off.   



​

The linux kids were like the young guys you got straight out of school
and told them to do the impossible.  Once in a while, they did.
​Ok, I'll accept that.  ​

Clem