From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932484AbVLFSU5 (ORCPT ); Tue, 6 Dec 2005 13:20:57 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932529AbVLFSU5 (ORCPT ); Tue, 6 Dec 2005 13:20:57 -0500 Received: from ns1.suse.de ([195.135.220.2]:39063 "EHLO mx1.suse.de") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932484AbVLFSU4 (ORCPT ); Tue, 6 Dec 2005 13:20:56 -0500 To: Greg KH Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Policy for reverting user ABI breaking patches was Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel References: <20051203135608.GJ31395@stusta.de> <9a8748490512030629t16d0b9ebv279064245743e001@mail.gmail.com> <20051203201945.GA4182@kroah.com> <9a8748490512031948m26b04d3ds9fbc652893ead40@mail.gmail.com> <20051204115650.GA15577@merlin.emma.line.org> <20051204232454.GG8914@kroah.com> <20051205185110.GJ9973@stusta.de> <20051206175017.GF3084@kroah.com> From: Andi Kleen Date: 06 Dec 2005 15:50:55 -0700 In-Reply-To: <20051206175017.GF3084@kroah.com> Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.3 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 Greg KH writes: > > And there will always be a need for new package upgrades for some small > subset of programs that are tightly tied to the kernel (like > wpa_supplicant or alsa-libs, or even udev). But "normal" userspace Actually I don't necessarily agree on that. It's best to avoid breakage even for them. It has actually worked for a long time. In the early days of Linux there was frequent breakage like this but then in recent times the kernel has been very good at this for a long time (one exception was the module rewrite, but that was a single flag day). I have been running modern kernels on old distributions for a long time and it generally worked. And if there is breakage of such kernel-near applications there should be an *extremly* good reason for this (and minor cleanup isn't such a reason). For example for the recent udev breakage imho the cleanup patch that caused this should have just been reverted. I know it's not possible to know such bad interactions in advance, but when they are known and there isn't an *extremly* good reason for it then the ABI breaking change should be reverted. It would be good to have a policy like this: if an important program breaks due to a new kernel [With important being fairly liberally defined as anything shipped in standard distros unless it's something exotic that does something stupid or is obviously broken. External kernel modules or /dev/mem access don't count.] then the breakage needs to have an *extremly* good rationale (fixing security bugs etc.) and if there isn't one from the person who submitted the patch then it should be reverted. -Andi