Re: [RESEND][PATCH] Add /proc/mempool to display mempool usage

[Matt Mackall]

On Tue, 2008-12-02 at 00:02 +0200, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> Hi Linus,
> 
> On Mon, 1 Dec 2008, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> >> Hmm, I thought Documentation/ABI/ was supposed to tell us what's an
> >> ABI you can depend on and what's not. I mean, you shouldn't be
> >> depending on anything but the interfaces documented in
> >> Documentation/ABI/stable/, no?
> 
> On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 10:12 PM, Linus Torvalds
> <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Who is the f*cking MORON that thinks that "documentation" has any meaning
> > what-so-ever?
> 
> Me, I suppose. At least that's the impression I got when being asked
> to document any new kmemtrace debugfs files, for example.
> 
> On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 10:12 PM, Linus Torvalds
> <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > The fact that something is documented (whether correctly or not) has
> > absolutely _zero_ impact on anything at all. What makes something an ABI
> > is that it's useful and available. The only way something isn't an ABI is
> > by _explicitly_ making sure that it's not available even by mistake in a
> > stable form for binary use.
> 
> OK, but why do we have those different ABI "stages" in
> Documentation/ABI then? The README file there seems to contradict what
> you say. Or maybe I'm reading it wrong...

If the terrain and the map do not agree, follow the terrain. â Swedish
army manual.

If code uses a public interface and we break that interface, we will get
unhappy users. Putting stuff in debugfs/ in a released kernel makes it
public. That's the terrain.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.

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