On Mon, 10 Sep 2007 21:58:21 +0200 Adrian Bunk <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 10:25:56AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> >...
> > Also, Adrian goes on and on with weird theories about how I'm picking on
> > him. But other patches (such as 7d12e780e003f93433d49ce78c) DO OTHER
> > STUFF. Like simplify the code, and make it smaller, faster or more
> > maintainable or more reliable.
>
> The unexport of sys_{open,read} actually makes the kernel smaller...
>
> > So the tradeoff is quite different from a
> > one-liner which does nothing but kill an export. And, contrary to his
> > claims, we _do_ put temporary back-compat wrappers in there when we
> > change interfaces on those relatively rare occasions when it is possible,
> > and when we remember to do it.
>
> Your tradeoff misses the impact on external modules.
>
> The unexport of sys_open will not break many modules, while
> commit 7d12e780e003f93433d49ce78c most likely broke the majority of
> external modules.
>
> Do we guarantee some API stability to module authors or do we not
> guarantee this?
Neither. We look at each change and make sensible decisions based upon a
number of factors.
> Emphasizing on API stability in the cases that don't matter much while
> breaking the API in cases that affect most modules doesn't make any
> sense at all.
>
> And your "remember to do it" is an important point. As an example, every
> change to a struct that is part of the signature of one or exportted
> functions does change the API of all of these functions. If we offer any
> API stability for external modules we need to review all patches that
> touch include/ because many of them contain changes to the modules API
> that might otherwise get missed.
>
> Let's either continue to state that their is no stable API for external
> modules or define some API stability rules and do whatever is required
> for implementing them.
There is no benefit in making some rigid set of rules.
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