Why I Never Read /. Comments
Much controversy lately in the world of Linux over on Slashdot about some obscure (to those of us who just want to store our files without caring about the minutae) feature of the ZFS filesystem leading to many, many comments.
The thing about Slashdot (and Digg and Reddit and…) is that the sheer volume of inane comments is so great, and the teeny volume of worthwhile comments so small that the worthwhile ones can be effectively thought of as zero. It is sad but true that on the day-to-day the vox populi really does have nothing to say.
Which is why when someone sticks their head up and does post a comment that seems to contain information - knowledge even - you’d think that the rest of the mass would consider carefully before flinging the feces. Witness this comment replete with factual insight:
Lovely biting sarcasm aside, to be honest, our storage layering in Linux leaves much to be desired. As witness the slow pace of improvement of the volume manager in recent years. This does not prove that layering is bad, but it suggests that our current conception of layering sucks pretty badly.
Note the poster’s use of our in the first sentence. Subtle indeed, but important. Connoting some sort of first-person association with the topic at hand, it would seem. But alas not so important that poster DaleGlass failed to notice it and proceeded to school Mr. Daniel Phillips with a sound
You don’t seem to understand snapshots.
That would be Daniel Phillips who doesn’t understand filesystem snapshots. This Daniel Phillips:
Daniel Phillips is a Linux Kernel hacker who specializes in filesystem, virtual memory and storage work. He is the designer and original implementer of the HTree directory indexing system, now a standard feature of Linux’s Ext3 filesystem, and was involved in architecting the virtual memory subsystem for Linux 2.6
Sometimes it really is better to keep your head down and enjoy the anonymous safety of the crowd Mr. Glass.
