Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751509AbbFYGbb (ORCPT ); Thu, 25 Jun 2015 02:31:31 -0400 Received: from mail.linuxfoundation.org ([140.211.169.12]:49208 "EHLO mail.linuxfoundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751043AbbFYGba (ORCPT ); Thu, 25 Jun 2015 02:31:30 -0400 Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2015 23:31:28 -0700 From: Greg KH To: David Lang Cc: Ingo Molnar , Martin Steigerwald , Linus Torvalds , Andy Lutomirski , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" , David Herrmann , Djalal Harouni , Havoc Pennington , "Eric W. Biederman" , One Thousand Gnomes , Tom Gundersen , Daniel Mack Subject: Re: kdbus: to merge or not to merge? Message-ID: <20150625063128.GA12499@kroah.com> References: <20150624080502.GA23842@gmail.com> <6295881.qFxhe0B0Ak@merkaba> <20150624131850.GA7346@gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.23+89 (0255b37be491) (2014-03-12) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1842 Lines: 41 On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 10:39:52AM -0700, David Lang wrote: > On Wed, 24 Jun 2015, Ingo Molnar wrote: > > >And the thing is, in hindsight, after such huge flamewars, years down the line, > >almost never do I see the following question asked: 'what were we thinking merging > >that crap??'. If any question arises it's usually along the lines of: 'what was > >the big fuss about?'. So I think by and large the process works. > > counterexamples, devfs, tux Don't knock devfs. It created a lot of things that we take for granted now with our development model. Off the top of my head, here's a short list: - it showed that we can't arbritrary make user/kernel api changes without working with people outside of the kernel developer community, and expect people to follow them - the idea was sound, but the implementation was not, it had unfixable problems, so to fix those problems, we came up with better, kernel-wide solutions, forcing us to unify all device/driver subsystems. - we were forced to try to document our user/kernel apis better, hence Documentation/ABI/ was created - to remove devfs, we had to create a structure of _how_ to remove features. It took me 2-3 years to be able to finally delete the devfs code, as the infrastructure and feedback loops were just not in place before then to allow that to happen. So I would strongly argue that merging devfs was a good thing, it spurned a lot of us to get the job done correctly. Without it, we would have never seen the need, or had the knowledge of what needed to be done. thanks, greg k-h -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/