Re: [RFC][PATCH] tracing: Remove useless 4 bytes of padding fromevery event

[Linus Torvalds]

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Seriously though. What's your take on changing the kernel that will
> break an older distro. Obviously, this change is too early to apply. But
> because an old distro has one app that will break if we make a change in
> the kernel, is that enough to keep that change out?

I suspect that powertop is enough of a developer thing that if that's
the only thing that breaks, we don't have to worry too much.

I don't want to break *everybody*, so new distro's should be
up-to-date. But breaking something like a F14-15 timeframe distro or
something staid like a SLES (or "Debian Stale" or whatever they call
that thing that only takes crazy-old binaries)? It's fine. We don't
want to *rush* into it, but no, if those distros are basically not
updating, we can't care about them forever for something like
powertop.

Things that break *normal* applications are different. There the rule
really must be "never".

                   Linus
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