Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Fri, 12 May 2006 12:13:52 -0600 | | From | "Jeff V. Merkey" <> | | Subject | Re: + deprecate-smbfs-in-favour-of-cifs.patch added to -mm tree |
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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.
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