On Mon, 19 May 2014 17:34:24 EDT Anthony Sorace <[email protected]> wrote: > > Ron wrote: > > > That said, the problems were due (IMHO) to a limitation in the > > update mechanism, not to the inclusion of a new system call. > > This is true depending on how you define "update mechanism". > A simple note from whoever made the decision to push the > change out to the effect of "hey, we're going to add a new > syscall, update your kernels before pulling new binaries" a > while before the push would have been sufficient.
I never understood why binaries are pulled. Even on a lowly RPi it takes 4 minutes to build everything (half if you cut out gs). And the 386 binaries are useless on non-386 platforms! Why not just separate binary and source distributions? Then include a file in the source distribution to warn people about changes such as this one (or the one about 21bit unicode) and how to avoid painting yourself in a corner. The binary distr. should have a provision for *only* updating the kernel and insisting the user boots off of it before further updates can proceed. This is a solved problem; not exactly rocket science. The harder problem is the social one.
