>I'll rephrase my question: why is it better to break every driver than
>to announce a new flush() method which has been appended?
Is the patch not the best way to announce a change?
It is, after all, absolute and obvious. (Who can miss page after page of a
NULL being added with the comment, /* flush */ ?)
Besides, if you're developing a driver, you should read the patches to see
what may have an impact on your driver. A new PCI interface, better IRQ
code, SMP changes, maybe a file operation, or perhaps user space DMA method
may appear.
If you're suggesting it should be possible to take a 2.0 driver and
instantly port it to 2.1 without a single thing breaking, you have some
extremely optimistic ideas and I'd like to sell you a bridge.
I'd say fixing a serious NFS bug is worth temporarily breaking every driver
(which they might later take advantage of it themselves if needed) in a
_developmental_ kernel. If this was a 2.2.x or 2.0.x kernel I might see
your point, but 2.1.x? No way.
-George
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