aufs on staging

[hooanon05 at yahoo.co.jp]

Amit Kucheria:
> CC'ing Junjiro on this. Not sure if he is on the kernel-team mailing
> list these days.

Thanx, Amit.
I left Ubuntu kernel-team mailing list when I knew aufs was dropped from
Ubuntu kernel.


> > On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:58 PM, Greg KH <greg at kroah.com> wrote:
> >> I have never rejected aufs to go into the staging tree, nor has anyone
> >> asked me about it.

Exactly.
I didn't ask you to do so because I was advised such like this (and I
reported it to Amit, Pete Graner and Colin Watson).
-------------------- begin quote --------------------
> Currently I am confused by many kernel trees.
> Will you advise me which tree I should try first, -mm, -next, -staging,
> or -2.6 (mainline)? And who should I sent to?

For a filesystem: work against Linus's latest tree.
-------------------- end quote --------------------

And I sent the aufs design to LKML in last February, and patches in
March. There was a small discussion on LKML. Greg, you might remember
that you had written about the entries under debugfs and sysfs.

As far as I know, in order to be merged into the staging tree, there are
some conditions particulary,
-------------------- begin quote --------------------
  - Some symbols might need to be exported from the main portion of the kernel
    source tree.  This is acceptable as long as the relevant subsystem
    maintainer agrees with this export.
-------------------- end quote --------------------

And Christoph Hellwig wrote strong NACK about aufs (in April).
-------------------- begin quote --------------------
Just making sure these exports aren't going to accidentally put in if
Greg happens to suck this pile into the staging tree.
-------------------- end quote --------------------
http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=123938262620587&w=2

Also he declared
"we want to do vfs-level union mounts, and at the storage summit we've
actually moved forward on that"

And resulting,
-------------------- begin quote --------------------
> I have been asked to include aufs into mainline from several people
> several times. As long as you have strong NACK for aufs and reject all
> union-type filesystems, I have to give up unwillingly and will answer
> them "Aufs was rejected. Let's give it up."

Yes, that's the case.
-------------------- end quote --------------------

> >> As long as someone is willing to help maintain it, and work to either
> >> just keep it going, or actually get it merged into mainline someday,
> >> I'll be glad to take it.

NACK from Christoph is the key, I am afraid.
But if the linux-staging tree accepts exporting VFS functions for aufs,
I will make the aufs GIT branch for staging.


J. R. Okajima