Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932073AbWELR00 (ORCPT ); Fri, 12 May 2006 13:26:26 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751142AbWELR0Z (ORCPT ); Fri, 12 May 2006 13:26:25 -0400 Received: from ns1.soleranetworks.com ([70.103.108.67]:54415 "EHLO ns1.soleranetworks.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751163AbWELR0Z (ORCPT ); Fri, 12 May 2006 13:26:25 -0400 Message-ID: <4464D060.70700@wolfmountaingroup.com> Date: Fri, 12 May 2006 12:13:52 -0600 From: "Jeff V. Merkey" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040510 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Linus Torvalds CC: John Kelly , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: + deprecate-smbfs-in-favour-of-cifs.patch added to -mm tree References: <200605110717.k4B7HuVW006999@shell0.pdx.osdl.net> <20060511175143.GH25646@redhat.com> <200605121619.k4CGJCtR004972@isp2dial.com> <200605121630.k4CGUuiU005025@isp2dial.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2560 Lines: 65 Linus Torvalds wrote: >On Fri, 12 May 2006, John Kelly wrote: > > >>Users who need vintage features can use vintage kernels. They haven't >>been pulled off the market. >> >> > >I disagree. > >We have two cases: > > - newer kernels don't always support vintage hardware any more. We don't, > for example, boot on 1MB PCs (I _think_ we used to), and quite frankly, > if you have 4MB, I'd be surprised it worked either (and that definitely > used to work a long time ago). > > Similarly, we've occsionally dropped a driver just because it wasn't > getting maintained, and we knew it couldn't work in the state it was > in. So over the years, machines have stopped being supported (that > said, if somebody complains, we try to re-instate the driver. Most > dropped drivers have never even been commented upon, because they > really aren't used any more. When was the last time you saw an MCA > machine or a PC98? I bet some people on this list have never even > heard of either) > > - we sometimes drop sw features that have been deprecated long ago, and > that there are better alternatives for. That said, this is pretty damn > rare too. I can remember Xiafs, and devfs is obviously on that path > too. > >But we do _not_ drop features just because they are deemed "unnecessary". >As long as somebody actually _uses_ smbfs, and as long as those users are >willing to test and perhaps send in patches for when/if it breaks, we >should not drop it. > >The cost of keeping a filesystem is not normally very high. The way >filesystems in particular get deprecated is if they have really serious >problems, and nobody ends up being able or willing to fix them at all, and >you _can_ migrate away. But if we're talking about win98, it probably >still actually has a pretty big user base, and most of the machines that >run it probably really cannot upgrade. > >For exactly the same reason you mention: > > "Users who need vintage features can use vintage kernels." > >ie you end up having people who have vintage hardware, and they use >vintage kernels, but in their case, the "vintage" is Win95 or Win98. That >does't mean that the _linux_ machine they use is necessarily vintage. > > Linus > > > Correct call. SMBFS is also very stable and well tested. Jeff - 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/