Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 24 Jun 2015 23:48:49 -0700 (PDT) | From | David Lang <> | Subject | Re: kdbus: to merge or not to merge? |
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On Wed, 24 Jun 2015, Greg KH wrote:
> 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.
I don't disagree with you, but it was definantly a case of adding something that was later regretted and removed. A lot was learned in the process, but that wasn't the issue I was referring to.
I don't want kdbus to end up the same way. The more I think back to those discussions, the more parallels I see between the two.
David Lang
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