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    SubjectRe: [PATCH] arch/x86/xen: remove depends on CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL
    On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 12:39:27PM +0000, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
    > On Sun, 24 Feb 2013, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
    > >
    > > You should not have unstable options in the kernel in the first place,
    > > sorry.
    >
    > With the premise that the removal of CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL is not an issue
    > for me personally or my work, I am going to give you my 2 cents on the
    > matter, but feel free to ignore them :)
    >
    > While I understand that CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL has been abused, I feel that
    > rejecting everything that is not fully stable and with external
    > interfaces set in stones, might hinder the development of new features.

    It's been this way for _years_ this isn't something new (the "you have
    to get it right really quickly" problem). See Documentation/ABI/ for
    some words about how you can try to do this.

    > After all, given how fast the kernel is moving nowadays,

    No faster than it has in the past.

    > maintaining a project out-of-tree until is completely ready for
    > production can be very expensive. Merging the project earlier and
    > completing the development upstream can bring better results.

    Yes, but don't go changing user-visable apis when you do so. That's
    been a hard rule for a LONG time.

    > But in these cases one wouldn't want to "market" the feature as stable
    > yet, because it just isn't. If CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL is going away, is
    > there anything in the kernel that can be used to tag a feature as "I
    > wouldn't use it in production if I were you"? Maybe just a comment in
    > the kconfig description?

    I know this is hard, I've had my own problems with it in the past. You
    don't know if you get an api right until you have a lot of users. See
    our previous "discussions" about this topic on lkml if you are curious
    as to the eventual outcome of threads like this:

    Yes, it's hard, but that's kernel programming.

    Sorry,

    greg k-h


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