On Sat, 8 Jan 2000, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> Good grief Charley Brown! You, in a few key-strokes, just blew away
> major portions of the work done over the past few years by software
> engineers who ported their drivers to Linux. Linux will never be
> accepted as a 'professional' operating system if this continues.
[snip]
We all know your position on compability. :) Many people, including
myself, usually understand and agree with it.
However, you are going a little far on this one.
The change is going into 2.3.x, and that *IS* the approiate place to break
interfaces. These kinds of changes should certantly not be introduced into
2.2.x.
This should cause you little difficulity, as your example of having to
upgrade to fix a bug should not apply. When you upgade to fix a bug then
you should just be increasing patchlevel. If there is not a patch for a
bug in 2.2.x which is fixed in 2.4.x then there is a bug in the Linux
development process.
In order to move forward, we *must* break things. To make up for this we
continue to maintain old versions. There are still bugfixes being made
against 2.0.x and there will be bugfixes against 2.2.x. RedHat even still
issues updates against RH4.2..
So if this were to have occured within a stable kernel version, or if it
had severly affected userspace, I would agree.
Do you really need to complain about this?
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Jan 15 2000 - 21:00:13 EST