Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 4 Oct 2006 15:26:09 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: wpa supplicant/ipw3945, ESSID last char missing |
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On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Jean Tourrilhes wrote: > > Sometime breaking userspace APIs is perfectly OK, while > sometimes it's not. You just have to make sure that Linus does not > hear about it, I guess ;-)
I see the smiley, and I think you're trying to be funny and clever, but the thing is, I actually think that's _true_.
It's perfectly fine to break ABI's if nobody ever complains loudly enough that other developers notice.
So yes, we could actually even make it a real hard rule:
"Breaking ABI's is fine. As long as you can hide the breakage so well that nobody complains loudly enough that anybody ever notices".
The very fact that this turned into a discussion is a sign that the ABI breakage wasn't handled well enough. Usually, when we do something, nobody ever even notices.
(For an example of such a ABI breakage: I changed ptrace() to not allow ptracing another thread in the same thread group about a year ago, because it turned out that it was a serious local DoS problem. In the 12 months since, I think we had two people who ever actually noticed, and both of them actually caused some discussion about ways to perhaps unbreak it.)
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