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Comment by robertlagrant

2 years ago

> That sentence is a guiding principle of software design that I cannot often quote, without entering into a huge discussion on the pain Reiser has caused

That's a shame. He did something awful, but that's nothing at all to do with the idea in the quotation. Ideas shouldn't be cursed because the wrong person said them; they should stand or fall on their own merits.

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robertlagrant

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pdntspa  2 years ago

Certainly, I have an issue with this idea that everything a person does gets cancelled because the person gets cancelled. Particularly in this era of intense political polarization.... It is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The world is full of examples of art and science from troubled individuals; much of our foundational understanding of certain areas of science is derived from the learned experiences of inhumane research conducted by nazis or WW2 japan. Yet one guy murders his wife and suddenly we are all rejecting a perfectly cromulent filesystem.

  • anthk  2 years ago

    No, ReiserFS was unreliable by itself. Run fsck on a ReiserFS filesystem with a ReiserFS loopback image/wm, then your whole partition it's trashed.

  • starfallg  2 years ago

    ReiserFS and BTRFS are the only 2 Linux filesystems that truly ate my data. Everything else I was able to substantially recover from.

    • __david__  2 years ago

      I had XFS eat some data once. I somehow got it into a state where it wouldn't mount and wouldn't fsck. Luckily for me it was "just" my backup disk, so after a week of fighting with it I just gave up and reformatted (as ext4) and didn't end up losing much. Was eye opening though. I'd rather have a slightly less featureful fs that I have a chance of recovering…

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    • pdntspa  2 years ago

      I've had really bad experiences with fat32 and xfat... back in the day it was pretty common to lose data due to hard drive or filesystem bullshit.

      In any case, I was a technology journo at the time this happened, and I covered this story, but I don't recall encountering a lot of technical discussion... it seemed to be mostly "ew this guy murdered his wife". Which is entirely deserved. (If a little unfair to the creative work)

      I wasn't much of a programmer yet so maybe I wasn't looking at the right discussions.

      1 reply →

    • wtracy  2 years ago

      ReiserFS and BTRFS always seemed like the two big "performance over reliability" Linux file systems.

  • znpy  2 years ago

    > Certainly, I have an issue with this idea that everything a person does gets cancelled because the person gets cancelled. Particularly in this era of intense political polarization...

    I think it's the crazyiness of this era. We expect people to be either "100% good" or "100% bad".

    Of course we, as a society and as individuals, are (unsurprisingly) deeply surprised when we find out somebody we like isn't "100% good" and can't accept that somebody we don't like isn't "100% bad".

    [edit: this is not 100% related to Hans Reiser, of course, more on a general tangent].

bombcar  2 years ago 

    Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. 

    I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. 

    The evil that men do lives after them; 

    The good is oft interrèd with their bones.

(What's interesting to me is that it's often black and white; dead people become either perfectly good or perfectly evil, depending on where you fall - only if they're "not important" are they allowed to be human and gray.)

sph  2 years ago

Certainly, I don't have a problem with the quote. I just don't want to face the inevitable "Hans Reiser? Isn't that the one that..." quagmire that pretty much everybody is going to step into.

  • Pet_Ant  2 years ago

    I have a Bill Cosby quote that I attribute to Dr Huxtable. It is sufficient citation, old heads will know but don't react, and new heads will just nod and not get triggered.