I have *some* sympathy because there are *two* problems here:
1. Someone who is trying out an OS for the first time should not be
using an experimental kernel, true. HOWEVER:
2. Public interfaces shouldn't be incompatibly changed without a good
reason and plenty of warning.
I feel that it is the confusion of these two separate issues that makes
this incident particularly controversial.
> PS. Aside from anything else, this episode show the folly of parsing
> text from /proc -- a programatic interface to get kernel information
> would have been unaffected by this, as well as being more efficient.
Agreed. The person who made the change seems to have been thinking of how
/proc/xxx *should* be used, not how it is *actually* used. Is there a
sysctl(2) for this information? (If you *must* do the work in a script,
first write sysctl(1) to support it.)
-- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mwood@IUPUI.Edu Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly. -- Oscar Wilde- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu