From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S268883AbTGJEBv (ORCPT ); Thu, 10 Jul 2003 00:01:51 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S268903AbTGJEBv (ORCPT ); Thu, 10 Jul 2003 00:01:51 -0400 Received: from air-2.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:7595 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S268883AbTGJEBu (ORCPT ); Thu, 10 Jul 2003 00:01:50 -0400 Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 21:16:45 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: Marcelo Tosatti Cc: jgarzik@pobox.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk, torvalds@osdl.org Subject: Re: RFC: what's in a stable series? Message-Id: <20030709211645.40353fc2.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: References: <3F0CBC08.1060201@pobox.com> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.9.0pre1 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i686-pc-linux-gnu) 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 Marcelo Tosatti wrote: > > Its a case-by-case problem. It is. Generally I think we should prefer to do the right thing rather than adhering to the old API out of some principle. Evaluate the impact on out-of-tree kernel patches (especially vendor kernels) and if it is unacceptable then reject the change or augment the API rather than changing it. > I reverted the direct IO patches because hch complained on me that they > change the direct IO API, and we really dont want that kind of > change, IMHO. OK, we're on to a specific case. Albeit a very small one. I think Trond's direct IO change was right. The impact on out-of-tree code is infinitesimal. Stick a #define O_DIRECT_NEEDS_A_FILP in the header and let the XFS guys write a four-line patch. There's no point in mucking up the kernel API to save such a small amount of work. Or merge XFS.