Andrew E. Mileski:
If you want to make a kernel change, you are going to have to champion its
cause. If you don't make an effort, no one else will either.
Well - I don't know. I think the kernel already contains
over a hundred changes by me. I submit them - sometimes
they are included, sometimes not.
> PS1 - I do not read the linux-kernel mailing list, and the newsgroup
> is mostly dead. Cc to me if you want me to read a reaction.
This doesn't help you gain support for your changes.
Linux is not a democracy. Ted calls it a meritocracy,
and that may be closer to the truth. (Hi Ted! Any progress
with a fixed e2fsck?) But these days the amount of time
Linus has may be a limiting factor.
> PS2 - A few days ago somebody reminded me again of my promise to make
> kdev_t a pointer to a device driver struct, and to handle the
> transition to large device numbers.
Then _you_ have to convince Linus and everyone it is urgent, or an
otherwise useful patch that deserves to be put in the kernel distribution.
I think nobody doubts that this change has to happen sooner
or later, although there may be discussion about the precise
details. But it is an important change, pervading most of
the kernel, and involving new system calls. No doubt Linus
wants to study the details carefully. But he has no time.
No amount of convincing from my side will give him time.
So, I wait half a year. He will still lack time
but perhaps the matter will have become more urgent, or can be
handled simultaneously with a somewhat similar matter, namely
the handling of > 2 GB files. And otherwise it will come up
a year later again. After all, my original changes are from 1995.
> --- ../../../../linux-2.0.30/linux/fs/isofs/inode.c Sat Aug 17 20:19:28 1996
You'd get a lot more support if you hacked the experimental (2.1.*) kernels.
This particular tiny change to iso9660 applies to every kernel
from the past two or three years, experimental or not.
Support is something I am not interested in.
My previous patch was against 2.1.34 (cross compilation fixes
for compiling an i386 kernel on an alpha).
Andries