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Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2010 14:54:03 -0800 (PST)
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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To: Stephane Marchesin <stephane.marchesin@gmail.com>
cc: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>, Dave Airlie <airlied@linux.ie>,
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Subject: Re: [git pull] drm request 3
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On Thu, 4 Mar 2010, Stephane Marchesin wrote:
> 
> In short, the "don't break user space interfaces" principle is making
> user space code quality worse for everyone. And it makes our lives as
> graphics developers pretty miserable actually

And _my_ point is that if you did a half-way decent job on versioning, you 
wouldn't be in the crappy situation you are now.

For chissake, the DRM versioning model is a total disaster. The reason you 
can never ever break user space interfaces is exactly because when you 
break them, X stops working.

What I suggested is to _keep_ a working model across different versions, 
so that you can get out of the rat-hole you are in now (and the rat-hole 
you put your users into, and the distributions).

It's simply _not_ acceptable to tie the X server and the kernel version so 
tightly together as the crazy DRM model does right now. It's not all that 
different from us requiring people to install a new glibc every once in a 
while, just because we added a new filesystem. Everybody understands that 
that would be totally insane.

Why does the X community not understand simple library versioning?

			Linus