From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S269242AbTGJMWQ (ORCPT ); Thu, 10 Jul 2003 08:22:16 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S269247AbTGJMWQ (ORCPT ); Thu, 10 Jul 2003 08:22:16 -0400 Received: from www.13thfloor.at ([212.16.59.250]:924 "EHLO www.13thfloor.at") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S269244AbTGJMWF (ORCPT ); Thu, 10 Jul 2003 08:22:05 -0400 Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 14:36:50 +0200 From: Herbert =?iso-8859-1?Q?P=F6tzl?= To: Alan Cox Cc: Jeff Garzik , LKML , Marcelo Tosatti Subject: Re: RFC: what's in a stable series? Message-ID: <20030710123650.GA16681@www.13thfloor.at> Reply-To: herbert@13thfloor.at Mail-Followup-To: Alan Cox , Jeff Garzik , LKML , Marcelo Tosatti References: <3F0CBC08.1060201@pobox.com> <20030710033409.GA1498@www.13thfloor.at> <1057836155.8005.9.camel@dhcp22.swansea.linux.org.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit In-Reply-To: <1057836155.8005.9.camel@dhcp22.swansea.linux.org.uk> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.28i Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 12:22:35PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > On Iau, 2003-07-10 at 04:34, Herbert Pötzl wrote: > > In my opinion (and you requested input *g*), the > > kernel userland API can be changed as much as is > > required to improve/stabilize/bugfix the kernel, > > unless this change breaks something in userland > > without an already available update/upgrade/etc ... > > In a lot of cases (like O_DIRECT) its cleaner to simply break the API > in a way that will spew warnings if people miss changes than mess around > with extra methods that instead break drivers that forgot to use C99 > initializers. yeah, I obviously forgot to mention this case ;) and I agree that sometimes this is the best way to do it ... but this is a little bit different because a) you do it intentionally b) you know how to fix it > I plan to carry on breaking the kernel internal API when I have to > and its easy to fix up the few affected users. I broke all the audio > drivers between 2.4.21->22 but that was worth doing for example. keep breaking the kernel internal ... 8-) best, Herbert