In June, we reported that the Fedora developers are planning to switch to Btrfs as the default filesystem in Fedora 16. While Btrfs is no doubt a huge improvement, many questioned the decision because Btrfs is just not ready for production use - especially the lack of a fsck equivalent.

These are what some of our readers pointed out in reaction to the news:

But do we have a fsck that can fix errors? Last time I checked fsck.btrfs could not fix errors introduced by things like power outages. And such things happen from time to time her. Also yesterday I accidentally pulled the power cord of my PC. I need a good fsck before I make the switch!

- Mathias Panzenböck

i've suffered from this bug (fsck segfault on poweroff'ed disk), and btrfs wont be default without a proper fsck. I think the basic idea is to add momentum to the development/fixing of btrfs and tools, so that things are sorted out soon. btrfs has been lingering on since quite some time w/o the effort that needs to be put into it to make it production ready

- Pankaj Pandey

The Fedora developers have listened and have decided that Fedora 16 will not use Btrfs by default. The announcement was made by Josef Bacik, Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat.

In order to hopefully (and I understand this is a unrealistically bighope) stem the amount of hostile comments and random remarks about Btrfs not being ready for F16 that I get with _every_ bz that get'sfiled against it, let me announce this as clearly as possible

BTRFS WILL NOT BE THE DEFAULT FILE SYSTEM FOR F16

Bacik, however, mentioned that Btrfs is still being considered as the default filesystem for future release of Fedora. The target release to have Btrfs by default has been shifted to Fedora 17 now.

I appreciate those who will continue to use it and report bugs, we are working very hard on trying to get everything more stable and it is a slow going process. With your help we will be in a better situation for F17.

[via Phoronix]