NTFS on Linux? Now who would have thought?
The problem with NTFS is that it is big, bulky, bloated, and cumbersome. That 27,000 lines of code may very well be needed to have a full feature read/write driver for the file system. I have personally done kernel level code and I have written and implemented file systems and device drivers. So I know what the effort is to make something like that. Because NTFS is a foreign file system to Linux, you have to support all available options, which is no easy feat. Additionally, NTFS was developed in parallel with the original Windows NT. In my use of NTFS over the past 25 years or so it's been around, barring a hardware failure, I was always able to recover from a disk error. Yeah, it's from Microsoft. Yeah, it has it's issues. But for what it is, and the generation that it was written it, NTFS is actually quite good, IMHO.
The Linux community should hunker down and start the code review process. Break it up into multiple files and call it a module. Go through and tweak the code and optimize it. Linux, and the *BSD's by extension, have needed a NTFS driver for some time, although in this day and age, the value of such is somewhat diminished.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
