Frederick Bruckman writes:

>> How did the buggy softdeps get into an official release?
>To be fair, I used it for nearly a year with out any evident problems.

The bugs don't seem to appear as often on some ports as on others;
on my VAX, softdeps is really unstable, it is relatively easy to
provoke a softdeps kernel panic simply by rm'ing or moving larger
file hierarchies, or doing other heavy filesystem (metadata probably?)
operations.  On an i386, I've only seen a softdeps related panic
once or twice since 1.5 (I'm still using softdeps on i386 but nowhere
else, and not on production servers either.)  Perhaps the testing
of softdeps on 1.5.x wasn't as exhaustive regarding the various ports
as it should have been...

--mkb