linux-kernel - Re: Linux 2.6.22-rc1

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Date:	Mon, 14 May 2007 21:18:17 +0100
From:	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>
To:	Jeff Garzik <jeff@...zik.org>
Cc:	Jean Delvare <khali@...ux-fr.org>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Antonino Ingargiola <tritemio@...il.com>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Linux 2.6.22-rc1

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..
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