Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 13 Jul 2000 15:07:59 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: [Announce] BKL shifting into drivers and filesystems - beware |
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On Thu, 13 Jul 2000, Jeff V. Merkey wrote: > > We already have versioning with modver to enforce version mismatches.
It's not about version mismatches.
It's about getting at all the drivers easily, so that one person (or a small team) can do a change that updates the interfaces for _everything_ in one fell swoop.
Which is actually how most of these things get done.
This is how people like Jeff Garzik can update the PCI initialization and finding code for hundreds of drivers. This is how Al Viro can get at the locking rules, and just update everything he can get his grubby hands on in one go. This is, in short, how we can make big changes without having to synchronize with every single maintainer of every single piece of the system..
Version mismatches protect against mis-use, at least to some degree, and at least of the accidental kind. But they don't allow for updating of external drivers.
Note, for example, how ReiserFS has been mentioned a number of times in the last week on Linux-kernel. That's because reiserfs has reached the point where it's used by a lot of people, but it hasn't reached the point where it has gotten integrated yet, so while the other filesystems were updated to new VFS layer changes, ReiserFS missed out. So did the other external ones, but they tend to have a more controlled user base so far: ReiserFS has apparently already gotten "out".
Don't get me wrong. To some degree I would _love_ to not have a large kernel archive. It's big, and it makes releases harder. No question about that. But the monolithic approach definitely has a lot of advantages.
Linus
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