If you wanna talk about sudden and unexpected reasons to stop using file systems, there's this:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/reiser...gets-15-years/

Switched to XFS as soon as I found out... Was sick to the stomach knowing that I had been using that psycho's work.

I used ReiserFS back when I ran Slackware 12 and messed with SuSE. It was okay, but I barely laid attention to the semantics of it.

I mostly have messed with BtrFS, ZFS, Ext4, and JFS since then. Hans got what he deserved, to be forgotten and removed.

Oddly even the article answered one of my questions - what if they just forked/renamed it? But I guess they would have already done that years ago oh well; but this does lead me to JFS too, I'm wondering at what point are they going to remove that? Not because of any of the devs of JFS are psychotic, but because there hasn't been any updates for like 11 years AFAIK.

I never messed with BTRFS, I think my use case has no need for it. Plus yea, the fact that for years on end it was never really considered 'stable' because of the experimental features I felt that BTRFS would remain in some kind of constant dev-hell and feature-creep. I am happy with a combo of EXT4 for boot F2FS for root and XFS for my home on a separate drive. Seems though I am the only user in this forum that keeps banging on for filesystems for NAND devices.

Oh no! You do not drag me into this license quagmire!

And ext4 is btw. a perfectly fine solution. Especially after it's recent 25-year fix-up touch...


Of course I know next to nothing about that whole Linux license thing. Except you have to tread very careful!

A search found this with some interesting remarks and links https://opensource.stackexchange.com...y-incompatible

If you're a lawyer, you'll love it!


I'm out. And anything Oracle I try my best to avoid, don't trust them...

3 members found this post helpful.

This is really helpful!

Its interpretation within the frameworks of the U.S. and EU systems reminded me that FOSS is and international campaign, so these interpretations are almost irrelevant to anyone who does not make a living from jura.

I put licensing issues like this all in the same bucket. Most people use some closed-source or "non free" software on their systems and Slackware provides a platform that supports this. See the insane amount of closed-source software available via SBo. As a reminder Pat gave his Official Blessing to the SBo project so in a sense... Slackware has ZFS.

The thing people keep dancing around is that these licenses revolve around the Distribution of software. There are a lot of licenses that say you can use the software, but you cannot redistribute. This is why many multimedia codecs, the NVIDIA driver, and ZFS are often not preinstalled in a distribution. Ubuntu's workaround for media codecs actually involves installing the OS, THEN installing the codecs as a post-installation step using a meta package.


There are also issues like corporate control, shenanigans with anti-competition, and even support boundaries. The kernel declares itself tainted as a way to inform the user that they aren't responsible for whatever stupidness occurs.

And all of this doesn't even begin to take into account the different laws across the globe. How this stuff is interpreted changes for each legal jurisdiction. The reason I prefer to rely on people like Linus and Pat is because they take a conservative approach to this situations to avoid unexpected impact to the user.

By obeying the "spirit of the license" Pat is actually giving ME the option to decide if I want in on that shitshow. Nobody is saying you can't install openZFS via SBo and then create your own installation media with it. By creating a ZFS-capable derivative of Slackware you can actually provide the feature and any legal issues will not affect the parent distro. In much the same way that Debian ships with Iceweasel but Ubuntu ships with Firefox. rantrantrant .....

3 members found this post helpful.

I'm not too deep (none) in requirements of recovery-booting/new-install-booting a system with OpenZFS, perhaps someone else could determine. Could you have the official Slackware installer that points to a separate media for modules and slackbuilds packages to load/include? I doubt the installer/boot program of Slackware ever envisioned this, but that could solve license issues and provide others with options. Be some heavy lifting I'd imagine...

I'd likely utilize the function, utilize the Slackware installer to install a fresh system, have another drive/media with prebuilt packages/modules the installer picks up that get installed/loaded.

Just throwing it at the wall to provide out there possibilities.

You could rebuild the kernel/initrd used in the Slackware installer to include whatever kernel modules and userspace tools are required to interact with ZFS. You technically don't need to change to the slackware install scripts if all you want is the ability to read/write a zfs pool for recovery purposes.

You could also use alienbob's liveslack scripts to build a recovery os that has openzfs added as an option squashfs module. I'd mimic his setup for the nvidia modules to make that work.

1 members found this post helpful.