So? IDEs are updated fairly frequently (and usually automatically). And anyway, if a tracepoint becomes obsolete its usefulness can actually be negative. They are tied to kernel internals by their design.
With ioctls it's different. Old user-space programs might not be tied to kernel at all.
Posted Nov 2, 2010 18:50 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
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Maybe tracepoints should be stable for a distribution. E.g. Netbeans for RHEL 6 or SuSE 11 could support a different but still stable set of tracepoints.
KS2010: ABI status for tracepoints
Posted Nov 2, 2010 19:07 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
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That would put a burden on both maintainers of NetBeans and RHEL/SuSE since their release cycles are not likely to be the same.
It's better to just guarantee that for N stable releases tracepoints will remain stable.
KS2010: ABI status for tracepoints
Posted Nov 3, 2010 8:35 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
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Maybe it is time to synchronize their release cycles? It is possibly wise to use the same longer supported kernel (like 2.6.27 or 2.6.32) in longer supported distributions anyway, so the tracepoints would be the same. At this point they just have to pick the same NetBeans version...