linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] sysctl: Undeprecate sys

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Message-ID: <m1ejsbnagm.fsf@ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com>
Date:	Thu, 09 Nov 2006 22:21:13 -0700
From:	ebiederm@...ssion.com (Eric W. Biederman)
To:	Alistair John Strachan <s0348365@....ed.ac.uk>
Cc:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] sysctl: Undeprecate sys_sysctl

Alistair John Strachan <s0348365@....ed.ac.uk> writes:

> On Wednesday 08 November 2006 19:00, you wrote:
>> The basic issue is that despite have been deprecated and warned about
>> as a very bad thing in the man pages since its inception there are a
>> few real users of sys_sysctl.  It was my assumption that because
>> sysctl had been deprecated for all of 2.6 there would be no user space
>> users by this point, so I initially gave sys_sysctl a very short
>> deprecation period.
>>
>> Now that I know there are a few real users the only sane way to
>> proceed with deprecation is to push the time limit out to a year or
>> two work and work with distributions that have big testing pools like
>> fedora core to find these last remaining users.
>
> Eric, do you have a list of the remaining users? It'd be good to know for 
> people using Linux in an embedded environment, where they may want to switch 
> off the option, but only if it doesn't break their userspace.

They are very very few.  The ones I recall are kudzu, radvd, and
libpthreads (which doesn't care).  

There is a thread a month or so ago about this where I did a request
for testers, that listed all of the users we could find.

The reality is that I don't think kernel developers can seriously find
them.

If someone actually wants to kill sys_sysctl more power to them.  As
long as we don't add more binary numbers I think it is actually easier
to support it than to find those weird users and remove it.

Eric
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