Re: Future of ext2 support in the Hurd?

[Marcus Brinkmann]

Hi Theodore,

At Sun, 12 Aug 2007 17:40:00 -0400,
"Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> There was recent discussion of taking out support for "dead" OS's and
> features in e2fsprogs, such as fragmentation, support for the Masix
> OS.... and Hurd.  So in the interests of doing some research to see
> whether or not Hurd was really completely dead, or just "mostly dead"
> (to in the Princess Bride sense :-), I did some digging, and found this
> list.

Thanks for getting in contact with us!
 
> There is an awful lot of out-of-date and extremely cobwebby pages out
> there on the web, but it looks like even there are some people working
> on it.  Am I right in my assumption that no one even though no one
> touched the ext2 code in two years, with the bulk of the files in CVS
> not having been touched in seven years, that there are still people
> using the ext2 filesystem in Hurd?

Yes.  It's our primary filesystem, and if you pulled support for the
Hurd we would be forced to create and maintain a fork.

> One question which is going to be interesting from my perspective is
> that of GPLv2 licensing.

I will address this in a second message.

> If the Hurd project is planning on dropping the ext2 filesystem, please
> let me and the ext4 developers know, since then we can clean up the
> special case code in e2fsprogs to support the Hurd.  

We have no intention to drop support for it.  In fact, we are very
happy with it.  How much are we a burden for you?  If it helps, we can
probably arrange it so that a volunteer cooperates with you if work is
involved in keeping the support active.

Thanks,
Marcus