Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 24 Jun 2015 23:31:28 -0700 | From | Greg KH <> | Subject | Re: kdbus: to merge or not to merge? |
| |
On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 10:39:52AM -0700, David Lang wrote: > On Wed, 24 Jun 2015, Ingo Molnar wrote: > > >And the thing is, in hindsight, after such huge flamewars, years down the line, > >almost never do I see the following question asked: 'what were we thinking merging > >that crap??'. If any question arises it's usually along the lines of: 'what was > >the big fuss about?'. So I think by and large the process works. > > counterexamples, devfs, tux
Don't knock devfs. It created a lot of things that we take for granted now with our development model. Off the top of my head, here's a short list: - it showed that we can't arbritrary make user/kernel api changes without working with people outside of the kernel developer community, and expect people to follow them - the idea was sound, but the implementation was not, it had unfixable problems, so to fix those problems, we came up with better, kernel-wide solutions, forcing us to unify all device/driver subsystems. - we were forced to try to document our user/kernel apis better, hence Documentation/ABI/ was created - to remove devfs, we had to create a structure of _how_ to remove features. It took me 2-3 years to be able to finally delete the devfs code, as the infrastructure and feedback loops were just not in place before then to allow that to happen.
So I would strongly argue that merging devfs was a good thing, it spurned a lot of us to get the job done correctly. Without it, we would have never seen the need, or had the knowledge of what needed to be done.
thanks,
greg k-h
| |