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After weeks of testing, CentOS 7 has been released. For a list of RELEASE NOTES, please see the Wiki.
CentOS falls in line with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, released just 26 days ago. It is also worth noting that an ALPHA release of Scientific Linux 7.0 is also available for testing.
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Always the dullness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits.
-- William Shakespeare, "As You Like It"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by evilviper on Tuesday July 08 2014, @06:46PM
Changing file systems affects users and admins directly. There are ins and outs of file system maintenance, backup, recovery, boot loaders, etc., etc. Several incompatible projects also affect code maturity and stability, as developer efforts are spread much more thinly, all over the place.
It affects all the interested 3rd parties, too. Ext2 was a good option for exchanging files with other systems, and Ext3 was compatible, but with the goalposts continuing to move, it seems it will never displace VFAT and NTFS, despite the compatibility difficulty, and patent issues. The more effort it takes to follow the moving target, the less likely anybody will.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday July 08 2014, @07:08PM
I donno man. Users simply don't do maint (what is that?) or backup (LOL), recovery means buy a new PC and complain about all the lost data and/or have steam and dropbox copy it all onto the new box, the OS installer sets up the boot loader and they never touch it again, ever. If you mean users as in people who hit my http server...
As for admins, again, what is file system maintenance I haven't done that unless you count defraging MSDOS partitions in the mid 80s, I don't backup systems or filesystems anymore, with virtualization and automated configuration, I only backup data, and have some moderately advanced systems to do it (although the NAS and virtualization boys are responsible for keeping their hardware up, I just get to spin up and down images on it). Since I don't do backups, restores amount to convince puppet to configure the new virtual image as a "X" and then run scripts to toss data on them. I can spin up something "new" as fast or faster than restoring it. Unless you mean lighting up a snapshot because of a big mistake, but that doesn't count and the NAS takes care of all that, not me. I run some bare iron like that, although its a lot slower than the production virtualized stuff. Other than screwing around with bootloaders for the sake of screwing around, which is kinda fun, I've never messed with them. When you replace a failed RAID mirror disk you get to reinstall grub, lilo in the old days, on the new drive, this is like a once a year or less thing so you google for it. Its not a serious problem.
I transfer files using TCPIP or much more rarely optical media. Last time I transferred data on magnetic media from one machine to another, or cross platform... I think they were still selling ZIP disks new, or maybe floppies? In fact I think it was on a ZIP disk? I haven't seen a new desktop or new laptop or new apple product with a floppy drive in quite some time... old stuff... old stuff.
"as developer efforts are spread much more thinly" LOL you go convince a FS dev to rm -RF his pet FS and work for another FS for the greater good of the community. Wake me when that happens for any FOSS project, ever. That just doesn't work. Best case might be pissing off a dev so much he quits development completely in that field and does some entirely different software. The only way to get a dev who wants to work on project ABC to work on project XYZ is to pay him. If he wanted to push changes to XYZ he'd already be doing it and you wouldn't be able to stop him, so he must not want to.
For code maturity and stability, just use something stable like the ext series, like 99% of installed boxes out there. Its not that hard.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Wednesday July 09 2014, @04:07AM
File systems are still needed on optical media, solid state, etc. They don't cease to matter, just because you aren't using "magnetic media".
Optical discs are pretty uniform, with the UDF file system, but with all those SD Cards, USB thumb drives, removable hard drives, etc., it's a sad, sorry mish-mash of FAT32, EXFAT, NTFS, etc. An open source file system could have dominated, if there was a focused effort on one, instead of a plethora of competing almost-the-same file systems.
Wake up... It has worked with the BSD forever, not to mention every other operating system out there. Nowhere else but on Linux is it such a mess, with Linus allowing the kitchen-sink approach to development, and accepting anything and everything. And RedHat and other distros just jumping from one to another on a whim.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 09 2014, @01:27PM
"They don't cease to matter, just because you aren't using "magnetic media"."
Sure they do, unless you're solely into experimenting or intentionally trying to create something that won't work on any appliance out there.
Just because you can put ZFS on a sdcard doesn't mean its a wise idea and almost no machines in the universe will ever be able to use it, no cameras, no cellphones, most computers... It is exactly like your UDF/iso9660 example for optical, I can burn a dvd disk with, say, btrfs, but that would be insane because I don't own a single DVD player appliance or any machine with a BIOS that use it in any way.
With a bit of extra work I could do something apparently useless that might none the less be highly useful in a way I don't yet understand to someone, is not an excuse to force the guy who does find it useful to stop, because its his fault that I'm not as creative as he is, especially if doing nothing to stop the guy wouldn't hurt anyone at all.
"Nowhere else but on Linux is it such a mess"
The fundamental problem is no one being able to find this "mess" other than located in the opinion of non linux devs, which by definition don't matter much to the linux community.
If it was a good idea, being open source, the linux community would have copied that good idea... so either its too hard to copy (LOL) or isn't a good idea (fairly likely) or is patented (LOL)
There is some toxicity in the argument such that traditionally for decades there has been a lot of PR along the lines of "you can't have linux on the desktop without (insert utter nonsequitor)" which has been said about such a wide variety of ridiculous things that any "appeal to the desktop" is automatically laughed at because the previous examples have all been jokes, which could be unfair although it usually isn't. Usually if there is no good reason for a bad idea, for lack of any better argument the "desktop" gets rolled out as a blunt weapon to try to bash a pet project somewhere it doesn't belong. We're getting there now with "integration" and "tablet" taking the blame for ideas which are often awful. I don't think this disclaimer paragraph applies in any way to systemd, or forced removal of harmless FS that someone doesn't like, however.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Friday July 11 2014, @07:54AM
If you used Ext2, ANY computer could read it, including Android phones, some embedded devices, and more. If Linux developers hadn't gone nuts and spread their file system development efforts too thin, then something like Ext2/3 likely would have gotten popular with devices, before ExFat came along, and before Microsoft was licensing NTFS. All your devices might support Ext2 today, for just a small change in leadership.
And if Linux had used UFS/FFS instead of developing Ext2 in the early days, I KNOW UFS would have taken over the world by now. A much better file system, and one with legacy support in all Unix-like OSes the world over, from Irix to AIX to Solaris, without any of the limitations of Ext2/3.
And don't scoff at ZFS. It's still early days, and could very well take over the world, in time.
iso9660 is only useful on MS-DOS, having 8.3 file names, and many other strict limits. Instead, you have to master CDs with a mess of hybrid file systems, and extensions to work on more than one OS...
Rock Ridge, Joilet, HFS, etc., ALL are necessary on some systems, but don't work on others. iso9660 is a crappy mess, and you're holding it up as an example to follow? Insane.
That's just circular logic. It implies everyone, everywhere is technocratic, has no other motivations, and are all perfect at judging such things. Many things done in Linux have been pointless dead-ends. And there's no question that Linux has lagged behind the BSDs in hardware support and performance at various times, so your claims fall completely flat.
I will ignore the rest of your silly rant.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday July 08 2014, @08:13PM
But, unless I miss my guess, all the old file systems are also supported, and you can choose one or several at install time. (At least its that way with Opensuse, which I tend to use more often than any Redhat derivative.)
So people upgrading stick with what they have. People experimenting choose the new. Everybody happy.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.