> User buys Banavision capture card. Oops! Not supported in 2.2. User
> has to wait for the 2.4 kernel to come out (months and months
> away).... or use a development kernel. Whoops! 2.3 kernel has
Come off it Ted, you know perfectly well we back port drivers as they become
stable - aggressively so.
Yes, but (1) it takes time before they show up in the 2.2 releases, and
(2) does this really scale? Consider how many speciality devices are
out there --- from business card scanners to TV digitizing boards, etc.
Can you really keep up with all of the new devices? Remember, today
people can purchase these devices and they come with device driver disks
for Windows. Are we saying that there's something Windows can do that
we can't? That's embarassing.
OK, so we don't want to lock down interfaces forever. I can accept
that. But do we really need to allow interfaces to arbitrarily change
during a stable kernel series? (Most of the times when we've need to
make such major changes to the stable kernel series, particularly during
the 2.0 series, stability has suffered.) I'd claim that it really isn't
that difficult to lock down internal interfaces during a stable kernel
release, and allow manufacturers to release device drivers that work
against 2.2 kernels. If they need to rewrite their drivers for the 2.4
kernels, fine.
I don't believe that it would be that hard for us to be able to match MS
on this front, and it would make a big differences both for users and
for peripherals manufacturers to be willing to support Linux.
- Ted
-
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/