From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932149Ab2CHXkw (ORCPT ); Thu, 8 Mar 2012 18:40:52 -0500 Received: from mail-ww0-f44.google.com ([74.125.82.44]:54403 "EHLO mail-ww0-f44.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756665Ab2CHXks (ORCPT ); Thu, 8 Mar 2012 18:40:48 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: References: <20120130222717.GA6393@kroah.com> <4F27C6EB.2070305@suse.cz> <4F54BFEC.6000206@suse.cz> <20120305160953.GA3870@kroah.com> From: Linus Torvalds Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2012 15:40:26 -0800 X-Google-Sender-Auth: HW-2zncvHBL-u6NFU_LYDnbGbzE Message-ID: Subject: Re: [PATCH] sysfs: Optionally count subdirectories to support buggy applications To: "Eric W. Biederman" Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman , Jiri Slaby , Jiri Slaby , Alan Cox , LKML , Al Viro , Maciej Rutecki Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 2:18 PM, Eric W. Biederman wrote: > > Keeping compatibility is easy enough that it looks like it is worth > doing, but maintaining 30+ years of backwards compatibility Stop right there. This is *not* about some arbitrary "30-year backwards compatibility". This is about your patch BREAKING EXISTING BINARIES. So stop the f*&^ing around already. The patch was shown to be broken, stop making excuses, and stop blathering. End of story. Binary compatibility is more important than *any* of your patches. If you continue to argue anything else or making excuses, I'm going to ask people to just ignore your patches entirely. Seriously. Binary compatibility is *so* important that I do not want to have anything to do with kernel developers who don't understand that importance. If you continue to pooh-pooh the issue, you only show yourself to be unreliable. Don't do it. Dammit, I'm continually surprised by the *idiots* out there that don't understand that binary compatibility is one of the absolute top priorities. The *only* reason for an OS kernel existing in the first place is to serve user-space. The kernel has no relevance on its own. Breaking existing binaries - and then not acknowledging how horribly bad that was - is just about the *worst* offense any kernel developer can do. Because that shows that they don't understand what the whole *point* of the kernel was after all. We're not masturbating around with some research project. We never were. Even when Linux was young, the whole and only point was to make a *usable* system. It's why it's not some crazy drug-induced microkernel or other random crazy thing. Really. Linus