Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1750770AbWJDWgc (ORCPT ); Wed, 4 Oct 2006 18:36:32 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751195AbWJDWgc (ORCPT ); Wed, 4 Oct 2006 18:36:32 -0400 Received: from smtp.osdl.org ([65.172.181.4]:63402 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750770AbWJDWgc (ORCPT ); Wed, 4 Oct 2006 18:36:32 -0400 Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 15:26:09 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: Jean Tourrilhes cc: "John W. Linville" , Jeff Garzik , Lee Revell , Alessandro Suardi , Norbert Preining , Andrew Morton , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, johannes@sipsolutions.net Subject: Re: wpa supplicant/ipw3945, ESSID last char missing In-Reply-To: <20061004204718.GA4599@bougret.hpl.hp.com> Message-ID: References: <20061003183849.GA17635@bougret.hpl.hp.com> <4522B311.7070905@garzik.org> <20061003214038.GE23912@tuxdriver.com> <20061004181032.GA4272@bougret.hpl.hp.com> <20061004185903.GA4386@bougret.hpl.hp.com> <20061004195229.GA4459@bougret.hpl.hp.com> <20061004204718.GA4599@bougret.hpl.hp.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1422 Lines: 35 On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Jean Tourrilhes wrote: > > Sometime breaking userspace APIs is perfectly OK, while > sometimes it's not. You just have to make sure that Linus does not > hear about it, I guess ;-) I see the smiley, and I think you're trying to be funny and clever, but the thing is, I actually think that's _true_. It's perfectly fine to break ABI's if nobody ever complains loudly enough that other developers notice. So yes, we could actually even make it a real hard rule: "Breaking ABI's is fine. As long as you can hide the breakage so well that nobody complains loudly enough that anybody ever notices". The very fact that this turned into a discussion is a sign that the ABI breakage wasn't handled well enough. Usually, when we do something, nobody ever even notices. (For an example of such a ABI breakage: I changed ptrace() to not allow ptracing another thread in the same thread group about a year ago, because it turned out that it was a serious local DoS problem. In the 12 months since, I think we had two people who ever actually noticed, and both of them actually caused some discussion about ways to perhaps unbreak it.) Linus - 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/