Re: Linux 2.6.22-rc1

[Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>]

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.

	Jeff