Factually, Fossil is no big deal. Its design shortcomings have been raised in the past from the Bell Labs side and the documentation (for Venti, I think, but it's not very important) suggests that Fossil was knocked together as a minimal Venti cache so the benefits of Venti could be utilised and the old file system could be abandoned.

I somehow missed that discussion at the time and never went back to find out how it panned out. But it sure feels with hindsight that Fossil became the trigger for the 9front schism and that would explain the sensitivity on either side. It's a shame, because the Venti potential remains unrealised as there isn't the Fossil bridge (where development is continuing, in 9front) to a better, full functionality file system that includes Venti backing storage.

Which brings me to the question I have been meaning to ask: what scope does Venti serve in the absence of Fossil? I appreciate that VAC is a handy form of archiving, but does it justify the complexity of configuring and maintaining a Venti archive? I know that vacfs has some failings I haven't had the opportunity or the inclination to investigate, but exhibit themselves only in P9P - in my experience. So is Venti only a trophy application, or are there serious uses for it among the 9front community?

Lucio.

On Wed, May 15, 2024 at 7:04 PM Jacob Moody <moody@posixcafe.org> wrote:

On 5/15/24 11:20, Don Bailey wrote:
>
> I have zero emotional attachment to Fossil. What I am asking for, not even demanding, is a fact-based assessment of the asserted issue. Pointing at the code is not an emotional attachment. It's literally the opposite. It's asking to demonstrate and document the issues, instead of asserting that something is awful because /you/ have had an emotional reaction to it failing. How did it fail? Can you reproduce it? What code is bad? Why is the code bad? If you can't answer these questions, maybe you
> shouldn't have removed it.

The emotional accusation I understand, it really seems like it's just fossil that evokes this
reaction out of people. Just fossil that makes people want us to prove without any reason of doubt that the
code should have been removed. I also just don't understand why people are so attached to fossil.
Is it because people feel like there is a high burden of evidence for touching the holy code
as ordained by bell labs? We didn't want it so it went. If you think this is actually a
mistake and there is a world of possibility to be had thanks to fossil in Plan 9 I encourage
you to maintain fossil yourself and prove to us that we were wrong in thinking it was dead weight.

I want to specifically compare the discussion that happened on this thread between p9sk1
and fossil. We think that no one should be using p9sk1, and so we spent the time to explain
to others the very real, concrete and specific issues with the code and implementation.

We are not telling any other user of Plan 9 to not use fossil if they'd like, we simply don't want to
deal with it in 9front. I think the burden of proof you are putting on us to make this
decision would only make sense if we were advocating for other distributions and current
users of fossil to no longer use it. It's fine, we're just not interested in it, sorry.

As I, and others, have pointed out now a couple of times. Adding fossil back to 9front
is trivial. Perhaps you haven't had the experience of having to sit in irc and help
new users get going with the system who really don't have opinions about anything and
then dealing with the outcomes when things blow up. As you said fossil is not exactly
easy to deal with, it needs a lot of special consideration. So why then are you complaining
that 9front made the decision to remove that option for the uninformed user? Does it not
make more sense to direct users towards a filesystem that is more resilient and requires
less watering?

All of this is entirely moot with gefs right around the corner. I can't imagine someone
willingly want to use fossil with gefs as a (soon to be) alternative.

------------------------------------------
9fans: 9fans
Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tad3dc0c93039a7d2-M0565bff8d967be11771601b6
Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription