Translation of the thoughts of Theodore TS ( theodore ts’o ), the creator of the EXT4 file system, on the development of EXT4 , the Bcachefs file system, Linux, ZFS core, code of conduct and file systems in general:
more than half a dozen people contribute to each ext4 nucleus. Currently, most of my time is spent on the review of code, conducting tests and improving the test application {KVM, GCE, QMU, Android} -xfstes. And I really rely on 2-3 other developers working in SUSE and IBM, which help me with the review of the code.
To be honest, BCACHEFS is not a completely single project – for example, Kent was an author of 72% of the patches between the releases of the nucleus 6.11 and 6.12, while out of 103 paths to Ext4 for the same period of time, I was an author exactly 0%. This is because I firmly adhere to the opinion that programming is a team sport, and my work as a technical manager is to give the Ext4 participants to do everything possible to improve the file system. We hold weekly conferences, and Darrick Wong, the senior developer of the XFS and the former accompanying XFS, takes part in these conferences – and I, as you know, helped him in matters of XFS testing, and Darrick helped me in various issues of Ext4 testing and even examined a couple of patches Ext4. We cooperate with each other, and that’s good.
I give other people to decide whether they want to trust their data to someone who is a lonely hot programmer who may well be more talented than me, but I will give you a hint – you can “be frozen”, attracting a team to solving the problem. It is not necessary to do it alone. Of course, for this you need to know how to arouse the best in others, and you must work together. And a polite attitude towards each other in the list of mailing lists will not hurt.
About the nucleus, COC, capabilities and future Ext4