[RFC] Remove NTFS kernel support

[Joao Barros]

On Feb 7, 2008 2:21 PM, Attilio Rao <attilio at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 2008/2/7, Alfred Perlstein <alfred at freebsd.org>:
> > * Attilio Rao <attilio at freebsd.org> [080207 06:13] wrote:
> > > 2008/2/7, Andre Oppermann <andre at freebsd.org>:
> > > > Eric Anderson wrote:
> > > > > I think Alfred's point is really interesting.  How many people that
> > > > > don't use it that say 'axe it' does it take to override 1 person saying
> > > > > 'keep it!'?
> > > >
> > > > The real question is how many people does it take to say 'I'll maintain
> > > > it'?  Just one.  Without it, it will only bitrot as evidenced by Attilios
> > > > question.  NTFS is currently broken, just not as obvious because WITNESS
> > > > didn't track and enforce lockmgr locks.
> > >
> > > Andre catched exactly my point.
> > > The big problem is that we have a list of several unmaintained fs.
> > > NTFS is in this list. The support is not reliable, it is only
> > > available in read mode and eventually bugged.
> > > I'm not sure I want to keep this if nobody wants to maintain it.
> >
> > All I'm saying is that I think this is a bit premature considering
> > the users.  Within less than 24hrs we've had a few users reporting
> > in as users, I'm sure the fixes (now that we have some good assertions)
> > are going to be trivial.
> >
> > Why not let it ferment/rot for a release cycle and then see what
> > the story is?
>
> Obviously if we can fix it is better, but axing is an opportunity I
> don't want to leave out and this is why I wanted to poll users about
> this issue. Eventually, if an axing is decided, it won't happen in
> short times but only once all situations for "migration" will be
> probed and finished.
>
> Attilio

I read (I think on ntfs-3g website) that one of the developers was
working for Apple specifically to fully support NTFS on OSX. If this
is to be true, Apple willing to give this code to FreeBSD, would make
it another interesting solution IMHO.


-- 
Joao Barros