On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, Matthew Jacob wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, Sergey Babkin wrote:
>
> > Matthew Jacob wrote:
> > >
> > > The problem is that at the time this was a huge issue there were a much larger
> > > number of machines and pieces of h/w and radically different OS's (or flavors
> > > within Unix even) to support. Such a wide set of differences is not really
> > > there any more, hence the cost of such support (and the style in which it is
> > > being done) makes less sense than it used to.
> >
> > I'm afraid, it is. How many versions of FreeBSD with incompatible
> > driver interfaces are out there ?
>
> Not too many. Major release rules have been adhered somewhat.
Given an O/S, this looks like pragmatism to me rather than rules. Even
when going to a new major O/S version, having to heavily rework the entire
driver collection prior to a release would be kind of O/S suicide, in my
humble opinion. :)
> > How many versions of Linux with
> > the same sort of incompatibilities ?
>
> Linux is far worse - the release of the moment....
Worse than what regarding what?
A far as the topic is kernel interface changes between major versions
(that seem to affect the second digit in Linux versionning), I donnot see
your point. Au contraire, most (all?) Linux kernel interface changes I
have had to take into account in some drivers seemed to have been designed
in order to minimize driver code changes.
About the Linux release of the moment.... :)
But we must consider the hudge amount of changes between Linux-2.2 and
Linux-2.4. I am under the impression that the differences between
FreeBSD-4 and FreeBSD-5 kernels will be of a comparable order of
magnitude.
How better FreeBSD will cope whith such mega release is what we must focus
about instead of doing not yet relevant comparisons, IMO. :)
> But the primary motivation for a UDI like i/f (which, btw, has a lot *not*
> going for it) in terms of multiplatform support is not the issue it once was.
Ah? My English-to-French parser oopsed here. You may reword it. :-)
Gérard.
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