Re: Linux 2.6.36-rc7

[Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de>]

On Thursday 07 October 2010 19:49:28 Eric Paris wrote:
> The safest thing would probably be to punt the syscalls to 2.6.37.
> Which is sad since I know a number of people are already working against
> them, but maybe that proves it's the best approach?

I agree with removing the syscalls from 2.6.36 because of the following 
reasons:

 * Reviewers have complained that the feature was not ready to be merged, yet.

 * At least some of the criticism did not get addressed (neither discussed nor
   fixed).

 * Some weaknesses in the interface design were only identified and fixed late
   in the -rc phase, changing the ABI.  There may be more issues, like the
   priority discussion.  This might leave us with a broken ABI we would need
   to support forever.

   (Making fanotify fit for HSM hasn't been thought through at all AFAIK but
   fanotify has legitimate use cases apart from HSM, so I don't necessarily
   consider this a blocker.)

 * The code has shown to contain the kinds of bugs which show that it was not
   tested very well before merging.

Thanks,
Andreas