Thats the difference between dying of legacy support and good efficient code.
And yes it is a difficult tightrope to walk. Im suprised it broke netware
so badly. The free netware client was updated very easily and speedily.
> running when customers needed them. In the future, we should not make such
> sweeping changes wuthout making certain there is still a method to support
> the old interfaces as well.
That can be hard. How would you efficiently hide the new page cache for example.
The other thing is that the model is very different. A good example here is
the 3c501 driver. I don't use 3c501 cards any more. Linux 2.2 works with the
3c501 because the code was part of the free software tree people who are
afflicted with them sent me the patches needed.
Similarly when other stuff breaks the person who breaks it generally is
expected to fix most of the other drivers.
The dentries stuff was probably the hardest change to deal with though. Its
not a simple proceedure to quickly fix up code without understanding the
problem, which reduces the number of users who fix it. (and yes I do get
patches from people that start 'I don't know C, but xyz wouldnt compile
in the new 2.1.x release so I copied the change from this similar looking
thing and now it works'.)
I don't claim we have the model right, but the rules are definitely different
Alan
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