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From: Anton A. <ai...@ca...> - 2004-05-12 22:26:14
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Argh! pine just lost the email I wrote so I am going to try and piece it back together... On Wed, 12 May 2004, Szakacsits Szabolcs wrote: > My impression is that people are not aware how huge is this task. IMHO > NTFS could be compared only with XFS or Reiser4. Both are worked on by 6-8 > people, full time. NTFS moreover also undocumented, officially - and some > parts still even unofficially ... Indeed. NTFS is just a monster FS and people don't really appreciate/know this. > How? If we know we could try to address it. > > > Beginners don't want to do the boring tasks and they can't manage the > > sexy stuff. > > If we explained why a "boring task" is important and actually it is part > of a sexy stuff then it maybe wouldn't look so boring anymore. > > We chould lists many tasks, explain why they are important and let people > choose what they prefer. However I'm aware that even preparing such a list > isn't trivial. So the first task could be: make a tasks list. Ah, but do you really want to sacrifice your development time to do that? It would take quite a lot of effort to set this up and then to keep it always up to date, etc... Time has always been the killer problem for us all. We don't have much/any of it spare so doing anything more than a bit of development is kind of not an option or the development stops altogether. Just as an example take this evening for me. I have answered five-ten emails (some non-NTFS related) and it is pretty much bed time for me as I have to get up early for work and the result is that I haven't been able to write a single line of code this evening. The last few weeks I have done the opposite: ignored emails mostly and done programming each evening and I got a lot done. Unfortunately I have so little time that I cannot do both programming and keeping in touch with everything/updating website, etc. )-: And I think this is a common problem among all of us. > > > Not necessarily kernel coding but also updating, cleaning > > > documentation, web pages, testing, etc. > > Yes, great. And I think that replacing the help forums with a wiki > > would be a step forward. > > The wiki sounds a very good idea! Yes, that would be quite cool. > But I think an adequate forum is also needed. I dislike them (though they > are still better than Anton's unreadable quoted-printable emails ;) but Yes, sorry. I am using pine at the moment so they should be ok. (-: If anyone knows how to make evolution not use quoted printable encoding please let me know... > most people who need help apparently like it. Far the most popular seems > to be http://www.phpbb.com/ I don't know if it can be [two-way] gatewayed > with mailing lists. Ah, but do we care about people who need help? I would say ignore them all and close all the forums so they don't bother us anymore and no longer take away all our development time. We do not need to support NTFS users. No one is paying us for it... Maybe we could charge for answering support questions? (-; > > Get a community rather than a few individuals. But... who's going to > > _manage_ all that. It won't just happen on its own. > > It won't. First we would need to know what exactly needs to be > managed and either somebody (or more people) accepts it or it > goes to the task list for potential helpers in the future. Inded. But the problems is we need someone to maintain/manage that, too, i.e. the task list etc. And there is noone to do it. Catch 22! > > tools are useful, but people want write support > > Some tools are needed to "support" write support: mkntfs, ntfsck, ntfsdb > (debugger, editor), test suite. > > We have mkntfs. I'm close to convert and rip off the consistency check > part from ntfsresize to reusable functions (for ntfsck, ntfsclone, etc). > But no ntfsdb (ntfsinfo could develop to that direction?) and test suite > (mine is totally ntfsresize focused). True. > > suggestions? (in no particular order) > > > > stop ntfsprogs devel > > I think the above tools are needed. ntfsprogs is also an easy and "safe" > playground, as Anton is wont to say. Yes, and I did. (-: > > give priority to driver > > I think it has priority. Agreed. Best regards, Anton -- Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @) Unix Support, Computing Service, University of Cambridge, CB2 3QH, UK Linux NTFS maintainer / IRC: #ntfs on irc.freenode.net WWW: http://linux-ntfs.sf.net/ & http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/ |
