"Richard B. Johnson" wrote:
>
> On Fri, 7 Jan 2000, Alexander Viro wrote:
>
> > Folks, there are changes underway in block device interface and
> > some of them made it into 2.3.38.
> [SNIP...]
>
> Good grief Charley Brown! You, in a few key-strokes, just blew away
> major portions of the work done over the past few years by software
> engineers who ported their drivers to Linux. Linux will never be
> accepted as a 'professional' operating system if this continues.
>
> It's enough of a problem putting one's job on-the-line convincing
> management to risk new product development to Linux. Once these
> products are in Production, and bugs are discovered in the OS,
> we must be able to get the latest version of the OS and have our
> drivers compile. If this is not possible, you do not have an
> operating system that is anything other than an interesting
> experiment.
>
> For instance, there was a simple new change in the type of
> an object passed to poll and friends. This just cost me two
> weeks of unpaid work! Unpaid because I had to hide it. If
> anyone in Production Engineering had learned about this, the
> stuff would have been thrown out, the MicroCreeps would have
> settled in with "I told you so..", and at least three of us
> would have lost our jobs.
Why didn't you just stick with the old kernel then?
Simple solution to existence problems for coder: Never change a running
team.
> Industry is at war. You can't do this stuff to the only weapons
> we have. Once you claim to have a "Professional Operating System",
> its development must be handled in a professional way. If major
> kernel interface components continue to change, Linux is in
> a heap of trouble as are most all of those who are trying to
> incorporate it into new designs.
The problem is that many of the intefaces you are talking about
are in a bad need for a change.
-- Marcin Dalecki- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Jan 15 2000 - 21:00:14 EST