Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel

Greg KH
2005-12-06T18:03:21Z

On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 07:51:10PM +0100, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 04, 2005 at 03:24:54PM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Sun, Dec 04, 2005 at 12:56:50PM +0100, Matthias Andree wrote:
> > > The problem is the upstream breaking backwards compatibility for no good
> > > reason. This can sometimes be a genuine unintended regression (aka.
> > > bug), but quite often this is deliberate breakage because someone wants
> > > to get rid of cruft. While the motivation is sound, breaking between
> > > 2.6.N and 2.6.M must stop.
> >
> > What are we breaking that people are complaining so much about?
> > Specifics please.
> >
> > And if you bring up udev, please see my previous comments in this thread
> > about that issue.
> >
> > It isn't userspace stuff that is breaking, as applications built on 2.2
> > still work just fine here on 2.6 for me.
> >
> > Yes we break in-kernel apis, all the time, that's fine. See
> > Documentation/stable-api-nonsense.txt for details about why we do that.
> >
> > So again, specifics please?
>
> It's the kernel-related userspace that is the problem (besides
> regressions that are simply bugs).

Again, specifics please?

> Be it the devfs removal, the requirement for a more recent
> wpa_supplicant package or my pending removal of the obsolete raw
> driver.

devfs was documented for over a year that it would be removed. This
after 2 year notice that it was going to be removed some time in the
future. So for over 3 years people have known about this.

You have also notified people about the raw driver going away, what more
can we do about this?

And there will always be a need for new package upgrades for some small
subset of programs that are tightly tied to the kernel (like
wpa_supplicant or alsa-libs, or even udev). But "normal" userspace
applicatations should not break, and if they do, we want to know about
it so we can fix it.

thanks,

greg k-h