Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1758896AbXIJMYx (ORCPT ); Mon, 10 Sep 2007 08:24:53 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1757468AbXIJMYq (ORCPT ); Mon, 10 Sep 2007 08:24:46 -0400 Received: from outpipe-village-512-1.bc.nu ([81.2.110.250]:53779 "EHLO the-village.bc.nu" rhost-flags-OK-FAIL-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753137AbXIJMYp (ORCPT ); Mon, 10 Sep 2007 08:24:45 -0400 Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2007 13:31:55 +0100 From: Alan Cox To: Andrew Morton Cc: Christoph Hellwig , Adrian Bunk , perex@suse.cz, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [-mm patch] unexport sys_{open,read} Message-ID: <20070910133155.27aa8365@the-village.bc.nu> In-Reply-To: <20070910022324.c69e1897.akpm@linux-foundation.org> References: <20070909202527.GT3563@stusta.de> <20070909203920.GA11764@infradead.org> <20070909145940.0b41c8a5.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20070910090808.GA31204@infradead.org> <20070910022324.c69e1897.akpm@linux-foundation.org> X-Mailer: Claws Mail 2.10.0 (GTK+ 2.10.14; i386-redhat-linux-gnu) Organization: Red Hat UK Cyf., Amberley Place, 107-111 Peascod Street, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 1TE, Y Deyrnas Gyfunol. Cofrestrwyd yng Nghymru a Lloegr o'r rhif cofrestru 3798903 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1308 Lines: 27 > I would like to see "everyone" explain what we lose by giving developers a > bit of warning before we break their stuff. We lose the ability to get anything done on a timescale that makes it happen. Instead we have this continual cycle of remove, akpm says no, submitter forgets, 3 month pause, remove, akpm says no, ... Adrian does now and then try and remove stuff its stupid to remove. People NAK those quite promptly. We've been trying to deprecate sys_open and the other related exports since 1.3.x or thereabouts. There is almost no correct sane way to use these exports either, because your fs struct may be shared so horrible things happen. I'm (minus the language selection) with Christoph "Effing" Hellwig on this one - for these symbols at least. When we break stuff people moan and we can put them back, providing they go into the Linus tree fairly early in the -rc sequence. In the cases we've inadvertently broken stuff before people have moaned fairly quickly too - eg when the tty layer took some inlines into _GPL exports by accident. Alan - 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/