Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 21:28:07 +0200
From: Jean Delvare <khali@linux-fr.org>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Antonino Ingargiola <tritemio@gmail.com>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Linux 2.6.22-rc1
Message-ID: <20070514212807.246c0281@hyperion.delvare>
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On Mon, 14 May 2007 11:43:45 -0700 (PDT), Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 14 May 2007, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > 
> > Sure, we don't allow that. Except for xfsprogs in 2.6.1, procps in
> > 2.6.4, oprofile in 2.6.13 and udev in 2.6.19, of course.
> 
> And we really complained about it! The oprofile thing should be fixed, 
> btw, and yeah,if udev breaks any more, I'll have to stop taking patches 
> from Greg. That thing has been a disaster, and everybody involved should 
> be ashamed and now hopefully *very* aware of the fact that we don't break 
> user-level interfaces.
> 
> (Right now, I suspect we may have a loop setup regression. Not sure)

While I'm all for keeping things relatively stable and not asking the
user to constantly upgrade user-space, I believe that we just can't
promise to never break user-level interfaces while keeping the
development pace we have right now. We can promise to grant people
significant delay before we drop compatibility options, but "forever"
doesn't scale.

If you really want to enforce the "never" rule, be prepared to either
see development slow down and finally come to a stop, or see the code
become unmaintainable and insecure and nobody is longer willing to work
on it.

> > We already have CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED for that.
> 
> ..and that should have been made more clear. I certainly didn't react to 
> it immediately.

You seem to assume that I remembered myself about this option when I
first replied. I wish it were true :(

-- 
Jean Delvare
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