Re: [PATCH 0/7] ide: locking improvements

[Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <bzolnier@gmail.com>]

On Saturday 11 October 2008, Robert Hancock wrote:
> Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> >> Sorry, but I just have to ask 'why'? IDE is seeing a whole lot of churn
> >> for something that should essentially be a stable code base in
> >> maintenance mode, and now scalability improvements?
> > 
> > It is the stable code but being in "maintenance only mode" has never
> > been true and as long as there are active users & developers there is
> > really no reason to change it.
> 
> Are there really many active users at this point? I'm not aware of any 
> new distributions that are using it. The only people I can see that 
> might still want to be using it would be people with old setups or old 
> embedded devices.. many of those wouldn't be using newer kernels anyway.

Like I said before: as long as there are any active users/developers
there is no real reason to stop IDE improvements (especially since there
is no complete replacement available).

I also wouldn't worry that much about what some distros are doing.  They
are free to make their own decisions based on whatever criteria they like.

> These kinds of changes only will really help scalability on multi-core 
> machines which are unlikely to be using this code anyway.. They seem 

>From my perspective the main gain of these patches is the increased
maintainability and sanity of the code, scalability improvements are
just an added bonus.

> rather like putting makeup on a corpse to me..

Please refrain from such comments.  Not only the metaphor is completely
bogus but it may sound disrespectful to some IDE developers.

Thanks,
Bart