I rejected it eventually and wrote my own implementation
"very poor code quality" may seem very cynical, however ...
Years ago, I designed and implemented a filesystem for a job request. A few months earlier, the two super project managers had asked to find a solution, some of us started thinking about it and "ran for office" (to get the task), bringing a solution.
I broght a personal project I had started at university, cleaned it up in order to present it as a "candidate project". It had nice featues, everything was B+tree based, and the whole module it could easily be written to run as userspace service (microkernel approach).
I presented a demo, running it on the top of the XINU uckernel on a Sequoia PowerPC board.
The code quality was for sure more than decent as it was already passing MISRA and DO178B-level D. However, being a personal project of mine, started during my university days, rewritten several years after graduation and carried out only in moments of free time, it needed some revision and modification. Nothing serious, I had estimated less than 3 weeks of work, allocating two people full time.
So, I presented it with a list of "Pros and Cons" and ... got then rejected because
- an experimental filesystem design? Sounds too high complexity and too exspensive!
- people (who?!?) want to use a Windows laptop
Then a colleague of mine showed up, who had downloaded the code from the Elm-Chan FAT website, and ... I really don't understand how this happened, but the two project managers thought it was exactly the right solution and ordered us to use that code, which I had then to split into 4 parts in order to have 4 teams work in parallel to be able to clean and make it "decent" for an avionics allocation that passed at least DO178B level C.
... and ... it was a massacre, a damn bloody bloodbath.
Did it make sense? ...
... well, in the end, if you consider the consumed "human power" of 4 teams of 3 dudes each, 8h/24 for 3 months, it costed more than 4x times the cost I had estimated for myfs, but hey? "
people want to use a Windows Laptop to copy GPS flight maps from a folder on the Desktop to the SD card/USB-stick that goes into the flight module on the airplane or helicopter" - said one of the two project manager ...
Computer science is sometime *VERY* frustrating