linux-kernel - Re: wpa supplicant/ipw3945, ESSID last char missing

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Date:	Wed, 4 Oct 2006 15:26:09 -0700 (PDT)
From:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...l.org>
To:	Jean Tourrilhes <jt@....hp.com>
cc:	"John W. Linville" <linville@...driver.com>,
	Jeff Garzik <jeff@...zik.org>,
	Lee Revell <rlrevell@...-job.com>,
	Alessandro Suardi <alessandro.suardi@...il.com>,
	Norbert Preining <preining@...ic.at>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...l.org>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	johannes@...solutions.net
Subject: Re: wpa supplicant/ipw3945, ESSID last char missing

On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Jean Tourrilhes wrote:
>
> 	Sometime breaking userspace APIs is perfectly OK, while
> sometimes it's not. You just have to make sure that Linus does not
> hear about it, I guess ;-)

I see the smiley, and I think you're trying to be funny and clever, but 
the thing is, I actually think that's _true_.

It's perfectly fine to break ABI's if nobody ever complains loudly enough 
that other developers notice.

So yes, we could actually even make it a real hard rule:

   "Breaking ABI's is fine. As long as you can hide the breakage so well 
    that nobody complains loudly enough that anybody ever notices".

The very fact that this turned into a discussion is a sign that the ABI 
breakage wasn't handled well enough. Usually, when we do something, nobody 
ever even notices.

(For an example of such a ABI breakage: I changed ptrace() to not allow 
ptracing another thread in the same thread group about a year ago, because 
it turned out that it was a serious local DoS problem. In the 12 months 
since, I think we had two people who ever actually noticed, and both of 
them actually caused some discussion about ways to perhaps unbreak it.)

			Linus
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