Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel

From: Lars Marowsky-Bree
Date: Tue Dec 06 2005 - 08:25:37 EST


On 2005-12-05T14:30:09, Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> Actually I would be happy with the stability of this series if people
> would stop trying to take working features OUT of it!

Features are removed when they are no longer features, but design
irritations in a new and improved design, and usually, equivalent or
better (or at least thought to be) functionality is available still in
the big picture (which includes user-space), hopefully in a cleaner
place.

Now, design is often a holy war, and people disagree. That's fine and to
be expected. And sometimes, the whole solution takes a while to
materialize and be implemented from the kernel up to all user-space and
even longer until it has been implemented in the brains of the admins.
This, too, is fine and expected. It's called "innovation" and
"development", sometimes iterative.

> working all that well in any case. But if existing features suddenly
> drop out from beneath the user, then you will find people doing what you
> mentioned, staying with old kernels with holes rather than moving to
> kernels which are simply no longer functional.

You're assuming the kernel is both "static" design-wise as well as
independent (or at least basically eternally backwards compatible) from
user-space. Both assumptions are no longer true. Get over it.


Sincerely,
Lars Marowsky-Brée

--
High Availability & Clustering
SUSE Labs, Research and Development
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH - A Novell Business -- Charles Darwin
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/