On Tue, 13 Jun 2000, Richard Gooch wrote:
> Alexander Viro writes:
> >
> > On Tue, 13 Jun 2000, Richard Gooch wrote:
> > > So I don't really expect wholesale VFS changes right now (but, hey,
> > > that doesn't seem to stop you getting stuff in;-). But that shouldn't
> >
> > They would not be there if not for your ability to get devfs there ;-/
> > And took three months of piece-wise feeding the fixes into tree.
>
> I don't quite see what the urgency was, considering that until this
> week, devfs has remained relatively unchanged (modulo minor VFS API
> tweaks) in the midst of this.
Yes. And all that time mounting the thing at several point was a huge,
fscking hole.
> Surely you had other reasons?
DAMN. OK, see here: to fix the situation with devfs (and IMNSHO releasing
the stable branch with that situation was impossible) we needed to add a
_lot_ of changes in infrastructure. They made sense and had to be done at
some point anyway. Not all of them are in the tree, BTW. So it was a
choice between removing devfs, not releasing 2.4 at all and doing these
changes (and doing them right - otherwise we would just prepare a huge
PITA for ourselves) ASAP. There _really_ had been no other options. And
changing devfs proper before these changes are done is not too promising.
Yes, some of them already are in there, so some stuff in devfs can be done
right now. Good.
What we are paying no is the price of these years when devfs grew larger
and larger and accumulated stuff from all layers of VFS. All these changes
were not done - you were just sitting on the growing patch and refused to
turn it into the set of small patches, each doing one thing and doing it
right. Fine, so that work has to be done now. I think that I'm actually
getting it quite fine - 3-4 months and most of the infrastructure is
built, thank you very much.
Yes, I had other reasons. This kind of stuff actually has to be done
right or not at all. So these changes started they had pulled in quite a
bit of other stuff - handling of pseudoroots in binary emulation, for
example. But doing all that stuff during the freeze and in effect
postponing the release... Not if we had any choice. Unfortunately, we
hadn't.
By the way, you do realize now why I was less than happy about devfs in
the form it had? Because I knew what kind of work did the inclusion mean.
And was rather pissed seeing your point-blank refusal to make that work
less messy. Grep l-k archives - it's all there.
And stuff already in the tree is not enough - aside of multiple mounts
there is revalidate() problems. So it will take more...
