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SubjectRe: + deprecate-smbfs-in-favour-of-cifs.patch added to -mm tree
Linus Torvalds wrote:

>On Fri, 12 May 2006, John Kelly wrote:
>
>
>>Users who need vintage features can use vintage kernels. They haven't
>>been pulled off the market.
>>
>>
>
>I disagree.
>
>We have two cases:
>
> - newer kernels don't always support vintage hardware any more. We don't,
> for example, boot on 1MB PCs (I _think_ we used to), and quite frankly,
> if you have 4MB, I'd be surprised it worked either (and that definitely
> used to work a long time ago).
>
> Similarly, we've occsionally dropped a driver just because it wasn't
> getting maintained, and we knew it couldn't work in the state it was
> in. So over the years, machines have stopped being supported (that
> said, if somebody complains, we try to re-instate the driver. Most
> dropped drivers have never even been commented upon, because they
> really aren't used any more. When was the last time you saw an MCA
> machine or a PC98? I bet some people on this list have never even
> heard of either)
>
> - we sometimes drop sw features that have been deprecated long ago, and
> that there are better alternatives for. That said, this is pretty damn
> rare too. I can remember Xiafs, and devfs is obviously on that path
> too.
>
>But we do _not_ drop features just because they are deemed "unnecessary".
>As long as somebody actually _uses_ smbfs, and as long as those users are
>willing to test and perhaps send in patches for when/if it breaks, we
>should not drop it.
>
>The cost of keeping a filesystem is not normally very high. The way
>filesystems in particular get deprecated is if they have really serious
>problems, and nobody ends up being able or willing to fix them at all, and
>you _can_ migrate away. But if we're talking about win98, it probably
>still actually has a pretty big user base, and most of the machines that
>run it probably really cannot upgrade.
>
>For exactly the same reason you mention:
>
> "Users who need vintage features can use vintage kernels."
>
>ie you end up having people who have vintage hardware, and they use
>vintage kernels, but in their case, the "vintage" is Win95 or Win98. That
>does't mean that the _linux_ machine they use is necessarily vintage.
>
> Linus
>
>
>
Correct call. SMBFS is also very stable and well tested.

Jeff
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