> > If Konrad and Boris agree that breaking the kernel's ABI in this way is > > acceptable in this specific case, I'll defer to them. > > My opinion as Xen on ARM hypervisor maintainer is that this is the right > thing to do in this case.
Sounds to me like the difference between "product" and "research toy". You don't break back compatibility in a product when you can avoid it. You may wish the publically humiliate those responsible (Linus seems to) but at the end of the day it's done. Your boolean choice is a false one anyway - you can do at least three different things - Implement and tell people to use the new API, break everyone's PoC and deployed systems, prevent old kernels running on newer Xen and generally make users lose confidence in it - Keep the erroneous API and live with the uglies - Keep the erroneous API working but implement a new clean API (and possibly make misuse produce a one per boot whine about fixing your kernel) The Linux approach has tended to be the last one most of the time, coupled with Linus having a rant 8) Alan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
