Re: + deprecate-smbfs-in-favour-of-cifs.patch added to -mm tree

["Jeff V. Merkey" <jmerkey@wolfmountaingroup.com>]

Linus Torvalds wrote:

> On Fri, 12 May 2006, John Kelly wrote:
>  
>
> > Users who need vintage features can use vintage kernels.  They haven't
> > been pulled off the market.
> >    
>
> I disagree.
>
> We have two cases:
>
> - newer kernels don't always support vintage hardware any more. We don't, 
>   for example, boot on 1MB PCs (I _think_ we used to), and quite frankly, 
>   if you have 4MB, I'd be surprised it worked either (and that definitely 
>   used to work a long time ago).
>
>   Similarly, we've occsionally dropped a driver just because it wasn't 
>   getting maintained, and we knew it couldn't work in the state it was 
>   in. So over the years, machines have stopped being supported (that 
>   said, if somebody complains, we try to re-instate the driver. Most 
>   dropped drivers have never even been commented upon, because they 
>   really aren't used any more. When was the last time you saw an MCA 
>   machine or a PC98? I bet some people on this list have never even 
>   heard of either)
>
> - we sometimes drop sw features that have been deprecated long ago, and 
>   that there are better alternatives for. That said, this is pretty damn 
>   rare too. I can remember Xiafs, and devfs is obviously on that path 
>   too.
>
> But we do _not_ drop features just because they are deemed "unnecessary". 
> As long as somebody actually _uses_ smbfs, and as long as those users are 
> willing to test and perhaps send in patches for when/if it breaks, we 
> should not drop it.
>
> The cost of keeping a filesystem is not normally very high. The way 
> filesystems in particular get deprecated is if they have really serious 
> problems, and nobody ends up being able or willing to fix them at all, and 
> you _can_ migrate away. But if we're talking about win98, it probably 
> still actually has a pretty big user base, and most of the machines that 
> run it probably really cannot upgrade.
>
> For exactly the same reason you mention:
>
> 	"Users who need vintage features can use vintage kernels."
>
> ie you end up having people who have vintage hardware, and they use 
> vintage kernels, but in their case, the "vintage" is Win95 or Win98. That 
> does't mean that the _linux_ machine they use is necessarily vintage.
>
> 		Linus
>
>  
Correct call. SMBFS is also very stable and well tested.

Jeff
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