The plea entry of an Oakland man accused by authorities of killing his estranged wife has been postponed until November 28th.

The arrest of Hans Reiser in connection with the murder of his estranged wife is having a ripple effect on the technology world. Because Reiser is the backbone of Namesys, the software's parent company, many wonder what his arrest will mean for the software's future.

Reiser4, the successor to the popular Reiserfs by Hans Reiser, has been in development for a number of years now and, for almost as long, Reiser has been pushing for inclusion of the filesystem in mainline — that is, to make it into the official kernel release. While reiserfs has been part of the kernel since 2.4.1, Reiser4 remains a feature offered only in third party kernel patchsets.

With Namesys founder Hans Reiser recently arrested as the prime suspect in the disappearance of his estranged wife, a brief thread on the lkml discussed the future of ReiserFS.

We’ve been using ReiserFS as our default installation file system for the last 6-7 years now, and it’s served us well in that time. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with it, some purely technical, some more related to maintenance. I’ll outline a few of the larger issues and offer my solution as a conclusion.

Nina Reiser, the estranged wife of well-known open-source programmer Hans Reiser, is still missing and a $15,000 reward for information about her is now being offered by the Oakland, Calif. police department.

Nine days have passed since Nina `Nenasha" Reiser was last seen dropping off her son and daughter at their father's Montclair home. Nina Reiser filed for divorce in August 2004. Hans Reiser was not at home Tuesday afternoon, and did not return messages seeking comment.

The question of if and when Reiser4 will be merged into the mainline Linux kernel has been an on-going debate for a couple of years. Hans Reiser posted a "short term task list for Reiser4" to address the remaining technical issues.

In this interview, Hans looks back at Reiser3, describing the advantages it had over other filesystems when it was released and its current state. He then explores the many improvements currently in Reiser4.