Re: What is standing in the way of opening the 2.5 tree? (quotas?)

[Neil Brown]

On Sunday October 28, [e-mail] wrote:
> On Oct 27, 2001  22:46 -0700, David S. Miller wrote:
> > In particular, the quota stuff, which has sat in Alan's tree forever.
> > If Linus is ignoring the changes it probably is for a good reason
> > but it would be nice for him to let Alan know what that reason is :-)
> 
> AFAIK (not much, since I don't use quotas), the on-disk quota format used
> by Alan's tree was changed to support 32-bit UID/GIDs, which makes it
> incompatible with that used in the Linus tree.  However, there was also
> some quota merging done in 2.4.13 or so, which _may_ have resolved
> this.

This is one of the reasons I haven't been using the -ac kernels:  I
would have to reformat my quota files.  And then if I had to back
out, I would have to reformat them again...

I had a quick look at the code in -ac and it should be possible to
detect with a fair degree of certainty whether the file is in the old
format or the new format, and to select between approriate read/write
methods accordingly.   I suspect that would make the new quota stuff
an acceptable change for a "stable" kernel (chuckle chuckle).

NeilBrown

P.S. No, I'm not volunteering.