http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2006-09/msg00557.html is probably the better starting point for that discussion (because he clarifies a few statement in subsequent mails) - and yes, that means reiserfs 3.6 will quickly become a dead end since SuSE was the only one actively maintaining reiserfs 3.x for a long time (and they did a good job with it).

OK ReiserFS will be obsolete soon, but what about Reiser4?

ReiserFS has serious scalability problems.

ReiserFS has serious performance problems with extended attributes and ACLs.

ReiserFS has a small and shrinking development community.

ReiserFS v3 is a dead end.

Anyway the only reason I see to put the ext3 FS on a partition is because there is a r/w driver on win for it.

reiser4 is broken by design or lack thereof (I've written a more exhaustive explanation some time ago, although that might have been in the german part of the board).

does this mean, as suse was the major supporter of reiserfs, that reiserfs will be dead in the long run? is kanotix therefore going to switch also their default filesystem?
for those who are interested, here's the thread in which slh explained why reiser4 is not stable enough (in german only)
http://kanotix.com/PNphpBB2-viewtopic-t ... iser4.html

This new filesystem features support for storage up to for 1024 petabytes per volume. A petabyte is 2**50 (two to the fiftieth power) bytes. If that sounds insanely large, think again. Individual supercomputers such as Lawrence Livermore National Labs's BlueGene/L already have over a petabyte of storage and several storage networks are reputed to have well over a dozen petabytes.

Ext4 also supports extent file writing. In extent, when a file is created, it is given a contiguous area of storage. Then, when the file is written to in the future, the new information is written at the end of the earlier file. This is meant to reduce file fragmentation and improve drive performance.

Extent isn't new twith Ext4. It's already present in the Reiser4 filesystem as well as in IBM's JFS (Journaling filesystem), which is used in AIX and Linux.

Like most other modern filesystems, Ext4 is also a journaling filesystem. This is a filesystem that logs file changes to a journal before actually committing them to the filesystem. The reason for this functionality is that, in the event of a file read or write problem, a journaling system makes it much easier to recover data.