Re: Linux 2.6.22-rc1

Christoph Hellwig
2007-05-14T20:17:19Z

On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 09:28:07PM +0200, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > 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.

never with a loong deprecations period. At least for APIs that are not
private to a single obscure driver. But this would require people actually
beeing aware of creating ABIs, and maybe someone with half a clue reviewing
them. Which of course is not the case today, thanks to ioctls, procfs, sysfs,
debugfs and co people can create userspace ABIs without a single though
easily, and they happily do it.