On Wed, 2008-01-23 at 09:00 -0800, Greg KH wrote: > Do you even know what our rate of change is? I just ran the numbers > last week, and they are much larger than has ever been reported in the > past...
No-one really cares what the rate of change is provided that amount of regressions stays relatively low. Surprisingly, it has. And that _has_ to be major surprise for everyone. > > I believe having stable kernel ABI can save many work hours of driver > > developer's, because they won't need to update their drivers every > > time when someone else broke something. > > I'm sorry you feel this way, but you haven't justified why this is so. > If you get your driver into the main kernel tree, any changes to the ABI > are done automatically for you. If it's really trivial driver; otherwise you have to commit yourself to be the maintainer and constant API tweaker anyway. > So that means that it saves the driver > developer's time even more that way, as they do not need to ever update > their driver again, which is not something that any other operating > system can provide. > > This also provides a more secure, and better product for the user in the > end. They never need to worry about external drivers, and everything > "just works" for them automatically. As I told you before, this is a nice idea but 'in real life' it's load of bollocks :). If we don't make it possible for users to install 'out-of-tree' drivers (and just drivers, nothing else) they are forced to do major kernel update after each new gadget bought. And that, in real life terms, means totally new OS to install. Plug and play, you say? IMHO the whole concept of providing complete kernel in one huge blob is flawed. Optimal case would be to break it into pieces with no dependencies. > > I believe development can go without breaking _already working_ > > things. At least not every micro-release. > > Please explain, in detail, how this can happen. > > Also, please explain how the different points that are expressed in the > file, Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt are not correct, and can > somehow be handled with your proposed stable api. It's not incorrect, it's just that you have basically ruled out regular users to serve joe random hacker (a guy that doesn't mind installing new OS twice per year). I'm fine with that, but I doubt that was the original strategy. That said, IMHO kernel is doing great. It's the Linux userland that sucks. -- // Janne -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
