heh, you seem to have misinterpreted what I was getting at. The main concern is that the lead developer, of ReiserFS, is in handcuffs. How can he work on his project now? :)

Source code is open, anyone can pick the project and continue it.

I used to use reiserFS, but only because it was the default option on Slackware. I use ext3 now, since it seems to be more supported, and easy to find programs for Windows to let me read/write them.

Hehe - on a real small keyboard ;)

Reiser3 is no more developed (as in mature as it will get)and bugs are handled by the kernel maintainers since it is part of the kernel.

Reiser4? History I'd guess - couldn't hold up against next-gen file systems anyway.

There were no next gen filesystems at the time of Reiser4, and I don't even think ext4 was in it's beta stage as is still is right now. The reason why it was not included in the kernel was because Reiser4 was a radical departure of what previous versions were, and according to the developers of the kernel, Reiser4 broke many coding standards of the kernel. Well that whole thing can be read about here: http://kernelnewbies.org/WhyReiser4IsNotIn

Anyways, as far as Reiser4 is concerned, it has maybe one maintainer left, and it is still not in the kernel tree, so at this point consider it dead. I am still wondering if those who maintain the kernel will decide keep the name 'reiser' or rename it, because *SUSE dropped reiser completely, and I think may have even modified the kernel slightly to not even include the source to reiser? Maybe, thats just speculation anyways.

Ext4 is supposed to be out of beta in the next kernel release but doesn't qualify as next-gen way I see it.

The developers seem to have the same opinion BTW.

I never used ReiserFS to start with. Why use it when Ext3 works perfectly fine?

Because ReiserFS may work better.

ReiserFS and Ext3 are two filesystems designed to be resilient and run on a variety of machines. Because they can be compiled on i386 machines they aren't as fast as other filesystems. However, any Linux machine and use them. They are a good choice for Desktops and Workstations where a user may accidently cut the power. Other filesystems would be a better choice for a database or media server that runs 24/7.

However, even years earlier, they way that ReiserFS was coded did not sit well with other kernel developers. ( I don't remember the details on this. )

I have an external drive that still uses the ReiserFS. What you need to be concerned about is whether it is still being supported. Non-supported code in the kernel is dead code that ends up being dropped. If NameSys doesn't exist in the future and no-one adopts the ReiserFS project, you may find that future kernels don't support it and will need to use something else.

Thats my concern with JFS since I heard rumors that the developers of JFS that ported that FS to Linux may have stopped working on it, and releasing fixes, but I have been to the JFS page (http://jfs.sourceforge.net) and they are still updating it, thankfully.

To me JFS is very light weight and has very good benchmarks against other linux FSs, and on my old K6-2 it runs very smoothly.

I used to use ReiserFS, but dropped it due to some nasty issues with it which resulted in lost data a number of times. I've heard a number of other similar stories from others as well. Basically it didn't work well with marginally flaky hardware (in other words for some hardware reiserfs would corrupt data where another FS wouldn't, due to minor, correctable hardware issues).

What issues? Please enlighten us since ppl might run into the same problems.

Doubt it. They both do journaling so... ?

NEVARR!!!!!!! My wife would not permit it... Besides I had already decided long ago, to stick to ext3 until ext4 comes out.

Reiser does offer higher inode and byte support than ext3. However, large data retaining organizations aside; there is no difference really.