Re: linux-next: add utrace tree

Linus Torvalds
2010-01-25T17:37:35Z

On Mon, 25 Jan 2010, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
>
> Earlier, you said that you haven't followed utrace "at all". Upon
> what real information do you infer that it has been over-designed?

Upon the information that people are talking about magic new kernel
interfaces to do fancy things. And talking about doing things with it that
are simply not relevant for ptrace/strace.

In fact, in this very thread I've been informed that there are no user
interfaces to utrace at all, which to me says that it's been TOTALLY
MISDESIGNED FROM THE VERY START, and has nothing to do with making ptrace
work for strace/gdb at the same time.

In other words, I may not have followed utrace development, but I sure as
hell can read. And everything I read about it just makes me less inclined
to want to merge it. The people who argue "for" it are actually screwing
themselves by arguing for all the wrong things, and making me convinced I
don't want to touch it with a ten-foot pole.

If somebody were to argue that "this is a simple series of patches to
clean up ptrace and make it possible to strace a debugged process", then
that would have been different. That's not what you or others have been
doing. You've been pushing exactly the _reverse_ of that, namely how great
it is for some random totally new features that I'm convinced aren't even
used by a lot of people.

So give me a populist argument that makes sense for tons of actual users,
not some f*cking "here's a cool infrastructure that developers can do
random crazy out-of-tree crap with". Because I'm not interested in crazy
developers.

Linus