* Zachary Amsden<zamsden@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 03/18/2010 12:50 AM, Ingo Molnar wrote:Our experience is the opposite, and we tried both variants and report about
* Avi Kivity<avi@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:Ingo, what you miss is that this is not a bad thing. Fact of the
It's very simple: because the contribution latencies and overhead compound,The moment any change (be it as trivial as fixing a GUI detail or asWhy is that?
complex as a new feature) involves two or more packages, development speed
slows down to a crawl - while the complexity of the change might be very
low!
almost inevitably.
If you ever tried to implement a combo GCC+glibc+kernel feature you'll know
...
Even with the best-run projects in existence it takes forever and is very
painful - and here i talk about first hand experience over many years.
matter is, it's not just painful, it downright sucks.
our experience with both models honestly.
You only have experience about one variant - the one you advocate.
See the assymetry?
This is actually a Good Thing (tm). It means you have to get yourSorry, but this is pain not true. The 2.4->2.6 kernel cycle debacle has taught
feature and its interfaces well defined and able to version forwards
and backwards independently from each other. And that introduces
some complexity and time and testing, but in the end it's what you
want. You don't introduce a requirement to have the feature, but
take advantage of it if it is there.
It may take everyone else a couple years to upgrade the compilers,
tools, libraries and kernel, and by that time any bugs introduced by
interacting with this feature will have been ironed out and their
patterns well known.
us that waiting long to 'iron out' the details has the following effects:
- developer pain
- user pain
- distro pain
- disconnect
- loss of developers, testers and users
- grave bugs discovered months (years ...) down the line
- untested features
- developer exhaustion
It didnt work, trust me - and i've been around long enough to have suffered
through the whole 2.5.x misery. Some of our worst ABIs come from that cycle as
well.
Sorry, but i really think you are really trying to rationalize a disadvantage
here ...