plans about the ext2fs patch

[Ognyan Kulev]

Hi,

I would like to share my plans about inclusion of the ext2fs patch for 
supporting large stores.

As you all know, the patch is in Debian's hurd package since December 
2004 and it's still not dropped from there :-P  Unfortunately, it's 
reported that it adds small amount of instability.  I blame GNU Mach for 
that.  For me, this means that until Mach is fixed I can't consider my 
work on supporting larger stores finished.  So I have no choice but to 
take a deep breath and dive into Mach.  I'll do complete code auditing 
and testing of memory handling (e.g. VMM and zalloc).

There are some good side effects of that.  It will allow reliable Debian 
GNU/Hurd buildd:s.  And it will be good knowledge foundation for me to 
explore possibilities for Xen port and thus resolve our use of very old 
Linux 2.0 drivers for disk and network.

The bad news is that I'll have even less time for Hurd because of other 
activities.  It's enough to say that I want support for WebFonts[1] in 
Mozilla Firefox for Linux, Windows and MacOSX and this is higher 
priority for me than ext2fs.  So it's possible that completing the 
ext2fs patch this year in my way may not happen.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-webfonts

Of course, I have no objections the patch to be committed into the Hurd 
right now :-)  Just tell me to remove some of the debug code there and 
to update the changelog entries.

Regards,
ogi