Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2015 09:47:22 +0200
From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
To: David Lang <david@lang.hm>
Cc: Martin Steigerwald <martin@lichtvoll.de>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>,
        "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        David Herrmann <dh.herrmann@gmail.com>,
        Djalal Harouni <tixxdz@opendz.org>,
        Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
        Havoc Pennington <havoc.pennington@gmail.com>,
        "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>,
        One Thousand Gnomes <gnomes@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>,
        Tom Gundersen <teg@jklm.no>, Daniel Mack <daniel@zonque.org>
Subject: Re: kdbus: to merge or not to merge?
Message-ID: <20150625074722.GB15616@gmail.com>
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* David Lang <david@lang.hm> 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

Actually, we never merged the Tux web server upstream, and the devfs concept has 
kind of made a comeback via devtmpfs.

And there are examples of bits we _should_ have merged:

 - GGI (General Graphics Interface)

 - [ and we should probably also have merged kgdb a decade earlier to avoid 
     wasting all that energy on flaming about it unnecessarily ;-) ]

And the thing is, I specifically talked about 'near zero cost' kernel patches that 
don't appreciably impact the 'core kernel'.

There's plenty of examples of features with non-trivial 'core kernel' costs that 
weren't merged, and rightfully IMHO:

 - the STREAMS ABI
 - various forms of a generic kABI that were proposed
 - moving the kernel to C++ :-)

... and devfs arguably belongs into that category as well.

Thanks,

	Ingo
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