Re: kdbus: to merge or not to merge?

Ingo Molnar
2015-06-25T07:47:33Z

* David Lang <david@lang.hm> 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

Actually, we never merged the Tux web server upstream, and the devfs concept has
kind of made a comeback via devtmpfs.

And there are examples of bits we _should_ have merged:

- GGI (General Graphics Interface)

- [ and we should probably also have merged kgdb a decade earlier to avoid
wasting all that energy on flaming about it unnecessarily ;-) ]

And the thing is, I specifically talked about 'near zero cost' kernel patches that
don't appreciably impact the 'core kernel'.

There's plenty of examples of features with non-trivial 'core kernel' costs that
weren't merged, and rightfully IMHO:

- the STREAMS ABI
- various forms of a generic kABI that were proposed
- moving the kernel to C++ :-)

... and devfs arguably belongs into that category as well.

Thanks,

Ingo