Background fsck

[Rahul Siddharthan]

Dan Melomedman wrote:
> Gary Thorpe wrote:
> 
> > I think ext3 would be easiest (ext2 is already available across the 
> > BSD's), but not technically the best. I think ReiserFS wants to grow 
> > into a database or some unified name space so..... What I would be 
> > interested to know if implementing some of them under a BSD license 
> > might peeve the original owners?
> 
> Can't do it with ReiserFS (License? Documentation?) since they want to
> be paid to port it. 

I think the question was about reimplementing it (fresh code), like 
NetBSD's BSD-licensed implementation of ext2fs.

If you write your own filesystem code that can read and write to 
ext3/reiserfs/etc, I doubt there are legal hurdles.  One would need 
to be very careful not to copy any of the  original code (eg, one 
person reads the original code and writes out "specifications" 
and the other sits in a clean room and implements the specifications 
without ever looking at the original code).  NetBSD's ext2fs code
is actually modified ufs code, they say the filesystems are not 
terribly different.  But some of these filesystems (especially 
reiser) are moving targets and keeping up with them from a fresh 
codebase wouldn't be fun.  I doubt it's worth the trouble, but if 
someone does a good job of it I'm sure it will be welcomed.

Rahul