when Ritsuko times out

Normally I don’t care about such things, but when the subject is the guy who wrote the ReiserFS filesystem (known among Gentoo ricers as THE thing to put portage on).

Anyway, in 2004 Hans and his wife Nina divorced. In 2006, Nina was missing, assumed dead. Go here for more detaills.

So Reiser wasn’t really that slick when it came to arguing that he was innocent. He even tried to use the ’socially inept programmer’ argument, which, as we all know, any real socially inept programmer wouldn’t even think of using. The evidence doesn’t really point anywhere, though, so he may not have killed his wife. Still, his arguments looked at the very least unconvincing, so I assume this must mean he did it.

The problem is, everybody’s saying that because of this they shouldn’t use Reiser’s ReiserFS anymore (Reiser3/4 are filesystems that perform exceptionally well with lots of small files). Really, that argument’s just wrong. That’s like… Kohinata from H2O! I mean, uh, like ostracizing the child because the father is drunk. Or bullying him/her because in the past his/her family were tyrants.

Worst of all, it’s just a few lines of code that was already on the backburner as far as real development was concerned when they divorced in 2004. Reiser3 was stable, and they were already working on Reiser4 back then. It had nothing to do with it. It’s not even a living person, so it’s not like they’ll snap and go stabbity murder on you. How can Reiser3 murder my Portage tree? How?

Just leave the poor guy alone.