Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Sat, 27 Jul 2002 07:38:02 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Sat, 27 Jul 2002 07:38:01 -0400 Received: from ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com ([166.70.28.69]:9557 "EHLO frodo.biederman.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Sat, 27 Jul 2002 07:38:00 -0400 To: Oliver Xymoron Cc: Erik Andersen , "H. Peter Anvin" , Andreas Dilger , Subject: Re: Header files and the kernel ABI References: From: ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) Date: 27 Jul 2002 05:29:09 -0600 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.1 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: 1046 Lines: 19 Oliver Xymoron writes: > > The idea of maintaining them separately is that people won't be able to > touch the ABI without explicitly going through a gatekeeper whose job is > to minimize breakage. Linus usually catches ABI changes but not always. > > I explicitly did _not_ suggest making it the job of libc maintainers. And > the whole point of the exercise is to avoid ABI of the day anyway. The ABI > should change less frequently than the kernel or libc. It's more analogous > to something like modutils. Except for ioctls. Until we can get those under control the abi headers need to remain part of the kernel. Gatekeeping on the ioctls is something we need. And even if the code is part of the kernel, Linus can still delegate the work of verifying it he wants. Eric - 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/