linux-kernel - Re: kdbus: to merge or not to merge?

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Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.02.1506242344520.1920@nftneq.ynat.uz>
Date:	Wed, 24 Jun 2015 23:48:49 -0700 (PDT)
From:	David Lang <david@...g.hm>
To:	Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>
cc:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
	Martin Steigerwald <martin@...htvoll.de>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	David Herrmann <dh.herrmann@...il.com>,
	Djalal Harouni <tixxdz@...ndz.org>,
	Havoc Pennington <havoc.pennington@...il.com>,
	"Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@...ssion.com>,
	One Thousand Gnomes <gnomes@...rguk.ukuu.org.uk>,
	Tom Gundersen <teg@...m.no>, Daniel Mack <daniel@...que.org>
Subject: Re: kdbus: to merge or not to merge?

On Wed, 24 Jun 2015, Greg KH wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 10:39:52AM -0700, David Lang wrote:
>> On Wed, 24 Jun 2015, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>>
>>> And the thing is, in hindsight, after such huge flamewars, years down the line,
>>> almost never do I see the following question asked: 'what were we thinking merging
>>> that crap??'. If any question arises it's usually along the lines of: 'what was
>>> the big fuss about?'. So I think by and large the process works.
>>
>> counterexamples, devfs, tux
>
> Don't knock devfs.  It created a lot of things that we take for granted
> now with our development model.  Off the top of my head, here's a short
> list:
> 	- it showed that we can't arbritrary make user/kernel api
> 	  changes without working with people outside of the kernel
> 	  developer community, and expect people to follow them
> 	- the idea was sound, but the implementation was not, it had
> 	  unfixable problems, so to fix those problems, we came up with
> 	  better, kernel-wide solutions, forcing us to unify all
> 	  device/driver subsystems.
> 	- we were forced to try to document our user/kernel apis better,
> 	  hence Documentation/ABI/ was created
> 	- to remove devfs, we had to create a structure of _how_ to
> 	  remove features.  It took me 2-3 years to be able to finally
> 	  delete the devfs code, as the infrastructure and feedback
> 	  loops were just not in place before then to allow that to
> 	  happen.
>
> So I would strongly argue that merging devfs was a good thing, it
> spurned a lot of us to get the job done correctly.  Without it, we would
> have never seen the need, or had the knowledge of what needed to be
> done.

I don't disagree with you, but it was definantly a case of adding something that 
was later regretted and removed. A lot was learned in the process, but that 
wasn't the issue I was referring to.

I don't want kdbus to end up the same way. The more I think back to those 
discussions, the more parallels I see between the two.

David Lang
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