On Sun, 9 Sep 2007 21:39:20 +0100 Christoph Hellwig <hch <at> infradead.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 09, 2007 at 10:25:28PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > sys_{open,read} can finally be unexported.
> 
> Andrew, can you please put this in?  Having these exports for syscalls around
> hsa been a long-time annoyance that can finally be fixed now.

Sure.  But I think it is better to give people some warning when we're
planning on breaking out-of-tree things.  I do occasionally receive reports
of "hey, the X driver which I get from Y doesn't work any more".  Often
it's open-source stuff, too.  I see no point in irritating our users more than
we need to.

If we're changing an API or removing a function then there's nothing we can
do, but in the case where we're simply deleting an export, it's exceedingly
easy for us to EXPORT_UNUSED_SYMBOL (and __deprecated_for_modules?) for a
few months.

Adrian knows this, yet he habitually sends zero-warning export-removal
patches and I habitually ignore them.  I guess we must both enjoy this or
something.