Subject: Re: Linux 2.6.22-rc1
Newsgroups: gmane.linux.kernel
Date: 2007-05-14 20:18:17 GMT (2 years, 7 weeks, 2 days, 10 hours and 8 minutes ago)
On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 03:53:21PM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote: > Jean Delvare wrote: > >On Mon, 14 May 2007 11:43:45 -0700 (PDT), Linus Torvalds wrote: > >>On Mon, 14 May 2007, Jean Delvare wrote: > >>>Sure, we don't allow that. Except for xfsprogs in 2.6.1, procps in > >>>2.6.4, oprofile in 2.6.13 and udev in 2.6.19, of course. > >>And we really complained about it! The oprofile thing should be fixed, > >>btw, and yeah,if udev breaks any more, I'll have to stop taking patches > >>from Greg. That thing has been a disaster, and everybody involved should > >>be ashamed and now hopefully *very* aware of the fact that we don't break > >>user-level interfaces. > >> > >>(Right now, I suspect we may have a loop setup regression. Not sure) > > > >While I'm all for keeping things relatively stable and not asking the > >user to constantly upgrade user-space, I believe that we just can't > >promise to never break user-level interfaces while keeping the > >development pace we have right now. We can promise to grant people > >significant delay before we drop compatibility options, but "forever" > >doesn't scale. > > > >If you really want to enforce the "never" rule, be prepared to either > >see development slow down and finally come to a stop, or see the code > >become unmaintainable and insecure and nobody is longer willing to work > >on it. > > Why do you think we -stopped- enforcing such a rule? :) > > It's been the rule throughout Linux's history. syscalls from early > Linux binaries should still work, for example. Except for very rare case (modules support comes to mine) syscall compatiblity works perfectly. But that's because syscalls are a very visible ABI and people don't break them by accident. They also don't decide they have a cool new scheme all syscalls need to follow now. Now compare that to sysfs..