Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 8 Jan 2000 23:40:00 -0500 (EST) | From | Gregory Maxwell <> | Subject | Re: [ANNOUNCE] block device interfaces changes |
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On Sat, 8 Jan 2000, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> Good grief Charley Brown! You, in a few key-strokes, just blew away > major portions of the work done over the past few years by software > engineers who ported their drivers to Linux. Linux will never be > accepted as a 'professional' operating system if this continues. [snip]
We all know your position on compability. :) Many people, including myself, usually understand and agree with it.
However, you are going a little far on this one.
The change is going into 2.3.x, and that *IS* the approiate place to break interfaces. These kinds of changes should certantly not be introduced into 2.2.x.
This should cause you little difficulity, as your example of having to upgrade to fix a bug should not apply. When you upgade to fix a bug then you should just be increasing patchlevel. If there is not a patch for a bug in 2.2.x which is fixed in 2.4.x then there is a bug in the Linux development process.
In order to move forward, we *must* break things. To make up for this we continue to maintain old versions. There are still bugfixes being made against 2.0.x and there will be bugfixes against 2.2.x. RedHat even still issues updates against RH4.2..
So if this were to have occured within a stable kernel version, or if it had severly affected userspace, I would agree.
Do you really need to complain about this?
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