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Linux developer Christoph Hellwig who had been listed as the maintainer of the SystemV file-system code has decided to orphan it so within the kernel source tree it will now be marked as being unmaintained.
What is this about? I'm just not sure what this means, and was hoping someone here does.
Without each other's help there ain't no hope for us
The code being orphaned is to support 3 very old (1980s era) Unix filesystems. We don't use any of them, and few Linux users since the ext2 filesystem was introduced in 1993 have ever used them. There are very few machines left running Xenix, Coherent (a Unix clone) or System V Unix and the maintainer doesn't have access to any of them so he can't actually test any changes in the code.
This change has nothing to do with the SysVinit system we use in MX. That code is still maintained.
timkb4cq wrote: ↑Thu Feb 16, 2023 10:26 am
The code being orphaned is to support 3 very old (1980s era) Unix filesystems. We don't use any of them, and few Linux users since the ext2 filesystem was introduced in 1993 have ever used them. There are very few machines left running Xenix, Coherent (a Unix clone) or System V Unix and the maintainer doesn't have access to any of them so he can't actually test any changes in the code.
This change has nothing to do with the SysVinit system we use in MX. That code is still maintained.
Oh, ok. Thanks for the reply. One more thing, and sorry for keep bothering, but just for curiosity, does this mean the original SysV code is going dead? I'm just confused.
Without each other's help there ain't no hope for us
Since the very early days of Linux there has been code in the kernel to support mounting, reading, writing and fscking those early filesystems. When more and more filesystems were added to the kernel these three filesystems, which had some common code, were grouped together in the SystemV filesystem module which could be enabled or disabled when building the kernel. That code is now unmaintained, though it remains in the kernel source for the moment. If a maintainer doesn't step up it will eventually be removed from the kernel source. Existing kernels will still have the code for those who need it but after the removal future kernels would not.
This happened recently to some networking code for Intel's WiMax system which never really caught on and for which a maintainer could not be found. We had to build new versions of some Realtek drivers to remove links to that code.
