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    SubjectRe: wpa supplicant/ipw3945, ESSID last char missing


    On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Jean Tourrilhes wrote:
    >
    > You can't froze kernel userspace API forever. That is simply
    > not workable

    Stop arguing this way.

    It's not what we have ever done. We've _extended_ the API. But we don't
    break old ones.

    I don't even see why you argue. Even the people directly involved with
    this thing seem to say that it should have some simple translation layer
    and do the internal format thing. We've had major subsystem that do that,
    and I don't see why you think wireless is so different, and so special in
    this respect.

    The whole _point_ of a kernel is to act as a abstraction layer and
    resource management between user programs and hardware/outside world.
    That's why kernels _exist_. Breaking user-land API's is thus by definition
    something totally idiotic.

    If you need to break something, you create a new interface, and try to
    translate between the two, and maybe you deprecate the old one so that it
    can be removed once it's not in use any more. If you can't see that this
    is how a kernel should work, you're missing the point of having a kernel
    in the first place.

    Also, I don't want to hear about how this makes things harder and more
    complicated. The fact is, we're programmers, and we should care about the
    _users_. If we don't, we're just masturbating. There's a whole other side
    to this "create software" than just the "me, me, me" side, and if you lose
    sight of that side, that's a really bad thing.

    Linus
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