Re: userspace breakage

Jeff V. Merkey
2005-12-29T23:53:53Z

Linus Torvalds wrote:

>On Thu, 29 Dec 2005, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
>
>
>>The breakage issue is ridiculous, assinine, and unnecessary. I have been
>>porting dsfs to the various releases over the past month, and the
>>breakage of user space, usb, nfs, memory management, is beyond absurd.
>>
>>
>
>We're not talking about internal kernel stuff. Internal kernel stuff
>_does_ get changed, and we dont' care about breakage of out-of-kernel
>stuff. That's fundamental.
>
>

Start caring. People spend lots of money supporting you, and what you
are doing. How about taking some
responsibility for that so they don't change their minds and move back
to windows or pull their support because it's too
costly or too much of a hassle to produce something stable from these
releases. If you export functions from the kernel,
don't break them. Don't let these numbnuts keep breaking things that
shouldn't be broken, i.e. memory manager (now that's a
big one). If you replace a subsystem with a newer one, keep a mapping
layer through at least the next .<even> release
i.e. 2.4 -> 2.6 (this is reasonable and expected -- you can drop things
but you should only do it on well understood
boundries). Don't let these people break everything every other
incremental release.

I have a family too Linus and I like to spend my evenings with them
rather then unwinding Olaf's bugs in NFS (the most
recent one). Think about "free and easy" and about making peoples lives
a little easier to support code on your platform
rather then expecting the rest of the planet to clean up everyone's
messes and sloppiness.

Jeff

> Linus
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