[RFC] Remove NTFS kernel support

[Vadim Goncharov]

Hi Attilio Rao! 

On Thu, 7 Feb 2008 02:00:41 +0100; Attilio Rao wrote about '[RFC] Remove NTFS kernel support':

> As exposed by several users, NTFS seems to be broken even before first
> VFS commits happeing around the end of December. Those commits exposed
> some problems about NTFS which are currently under investigation.
> Ultimately, This filesystem is also unmaintained at the moment.

> Speaking with jeff, we agreed on what can be a possible compromise:
> remove the kernel support for NTFS and maybe take care of the FUSE
> implementation.
> What I now propose is a small survey which can shade a light on us
> about what do you think about this idea and its implications:
> - Do you use NTFS?

Yes, occasionally. And I had scenarios when I was needed it withput Internet
access, FUSE, etc.

> - Are you interested in maintaining it?

Not in 8.0 timeline :)

> - Do you know a good reason to not use FUSE ntfs implementation? What
> the kernel counter part adds?

Localization: ntfs-3g requires UTF-8 as the only locale. And FreeBSD is not
good in supporting UTF-8 everywhere (syscons, ufs2, etc.), while kernel part
supports recoding to current locale's codepage. Valuable for people with non
Latin-1 set.

> - Do you think axing the kernel support a good idea?

No. It was said about FAT32 as most popular FS for file exchange, look at that
new USB flash devices with 4G+ sizes. People want to store 4G+ size files on
them (e.g. DVD images), so I've already seen some of them formatted to NTFS
instead of FAT32. Having support for them out of the box is good.

-- 
WBR, Vadim Goncharov. ICQ#166852181       mailto:vadim_nuclight at mail.ru
[Moderator of RU.ANTI-ECOLOGY][FreeBSD][http://antigreen.org][LJ:/nuclight]