[conspire] The practice of making ext4 a default needs to die an excruciating and gruesome death

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Fri, 2012-08-10 at 23:00 -0700, Adrien Lamothe wrote:
> --I recently discovered Gnote, which is a clone of Tomboy Notes, only
> written in C++ without any use of Mono libraries. It is available in
> the Ubuntu 12.04 software center, synaptic or command line APT. Highly
> recommended.

OK, I just installed it, and it looks EXACTLY like Tomboy. It even
instantly automagically imported all my Tomboy notes. However, I very
quickly found a less-than-obvious difference: When Tomboy comes up, I
can close its main window and any open notes stay open for me to work
on. If I do that in Gnote, the program exits altogether. Definitely
annoying. Also, Tomboy puts up a handy menu in the taskbar listing all
notes, which you can directly go to with a single click, bypassing the
main window. This is absent in Gnote.

> --Strangely enough, I yet to experience any ext4 problems. Maybe I'm
> just careful about how I use computers (graceful shutdowns of both
> programs and system, don't use a bunch of software at once, etc.) and
> that reduces the chance of bad things happening to the filesystem.
> Maybe someone should ask Linus to develop a filesystem, which
> alongside Linux and Git will surely cement his reputation as the
> greatest and most significant (in terms of world impact) programmer of
> all time.
> 
The rise of "crash-only computing" in the industry has produced file
systems specifically designed to prevent exactly these problems. Asking
Linus to develop a new file system would be reinventing the wheel, and
if the ext* series is any indication, he's really the wrong person to
ask anyway. We need some of those "crash-only computing" file systems on
Linux RIGHT NOW. Any pointers?