Well, my hope when bcachefs was merged was for it to be a real kernel community project.
At the time it looked like that could happen - there was real interest from Redhat prior to merging. Sadly Redhat's involvement never translated into much code, and while upstreaming did get me a large influx of users - many of which have helped enormously with the QA and stabilization effort - the drama and controversies have kept developers away, so on the whole it's meant more work, pressure and stress for me.
So DKMS wouldn't be the worst route, at this point. It would be a real shame though, this close to taking the experimental label off, and an enormous hassle for users and distributions.
But it's not my call to make, of course. I just write code...
the drama and controversies have kept developers away
well there you have it. i am not saying the drama is your fault because it really doesn't matter whose fault it is. regardless of who is causing drama, your only chance to reduce drama (and stress for you) is to deescalate. even if linus is causing the drama, actually especially if linus is causing the drama (we all know that he doesn't have the most agreeable personality) you need to do things his way and work to earn his trust.
others here in the comments ask you to recognize and admit you are wrong, but i'd say no, you don't have to. this is not a matter of who is right. that's completely besides the point. it's a matter of politics and diplomacy. agree to disagree and move on. that is what i hope you can recognize. to accept defeat of an argument even if you are right, and to avoid causing arguments in the first place. it's like marriage. if you want to keep the relationship, you need to defer until you earn their trust. but unlike marriage you can't ask others to join you in relationship counseling. you have to do all the relationship work yourself.
i am rooting for you, and i look forward to the day that i can use bcachefs myself.
btw: is there any goal to support in place conversion from ext4 like btrfs supports. (and maybe even from btrfs :-)
DKMS is an awful user experience, it's an easy way to render a system unbootable. I hope Linus doesn't force existing users, like me, down that path. It's why I avoid zfs, however good it may be.
One of my machines runs root on ZFS via DKMS. I will grant that it is annoying, and it used to be worse, but I don't think it's been quite as bad as all that for a very long time. I would also argue that it's more acceptable for testing actively developed stuff that's getting the bugs worked out in order to work towards mainlining.
That said, I vaguely seem to recall that bcachefs ended up involving changes to other parts of the kernel to better support it; if that's true then DKMS is likely to be much more painful if not outright impossible. It's fine to compile one module (or even several) against a normal kernel, but the moment you have to patch parts of the "main" kernel it's gonna get messy.
I think my problem is that it's just close enough to being fire-and-forget that I forget how to do the recovery when it misfires. It usually seems to crop up when I'm on vacation or something and I don't have my tools.
Yeah idk 5+ years now of ZFS on Linux for me without a single hiccup (other than me letting a drive die that wasn't properly backed up). The modules get rebuilt when the distro installs a new kernel. I've never once even had to think about it.
ZFS should be avoided because it has too many dumb complete failure states (having run it in a real production storage environment), not because it's DKMS
