Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751488AbbFYGtS (ORCPT ); Thu, 25 Jun 2015 02:49:18 -0400 Received: from mail.lang.hm ([64.81.33.126]:42034 "EHLO bifrost.lang.hm" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750919AbbFYGtL (ORCPT ); Thu, 25 Jun 2015 02:49:11 -0400 Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2015 23:48:49 -0700 (PDT) From: David Lang X-X-Sender: dlang@asgard.lang.hm To: Greg KH 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? In-Reply-To: <20150625063128.GA12499@kroah.com> Message-ID: References: <20150624080502.GA23842@gmail.com> <6295881.qFxhe0B0Ak@merkaba> <20150624131850.GA7346@gmail.com> <20150625063128.GA12499@kroah.com> User-Agent: Alpine 2.02 (DEB 1266 2009-07-14) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2252 Lines: 48 On Wed, 24 Jun 2015, Greg KH wrote: > 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. I don't disagree with you, but it was definantly a case of adding something that was later regretted and removed. A lot was learned in the process, but that wasn't the issue I was referring to. I don't want kdbus to end up the same way. The more I think back to those discussions, the more parallels I see between the two. David Lang -- 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/