The ghost of sysfs past

Posted Jul 24, 2010 20:15 UTC (Sat) by jcm (subscriber, #18262)
In reply to: The ghost of sysfs past by russell
Parent article: The ghost of sysfs past

Obviously, I don't think deliberate incompatibility should be introduced, but I *really* don't think upstream should be worried about breaking an older vendor userland. The vendor is responsible for the kernel on their distribution, and isn't going to offer support for upstream kernels anyway. It seems like a giant non-argument to say that it even matters.

(personal opinion only)

The ghost of sysfs past

Posted Jul 24, 2010 23:50 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (2 responses)

Introducing kernel incompatibilities always results in you reducing the number of people who can test your distribution. Sometimes that's an acceptable tradeoff, but telling people who run Red Hat Enterprise Linux(tm) 5 that it's impossible for them to run a later kernel with their existing userspace sounds like a great way to reduce the number of people who can give you feedback for later releases.

The ghost of sysfs past

Posted Jul 27, 2010 8:33 UTC (Tue) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link] (1 responses)

RHEL 6 will be out this year, and RHEL users who want later features can use that. Don't hold back progress.

The ghost of sysfs past

Posted Jul 27, 2010 9:43 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Noone is holding back progress. Things can progress just fine with a bit more backward compatibility. Not everyone will be able to jump to new releases whenever they happen.