On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 14, 2014 11:18 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by johannbg
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

Last time I checked there was no stability promises with regards to the kernel commandline

I don't think there are formal stability promises for anything in the kernel. It's just that the kernel people have a good track record of not changing things without cause, and they're trying to keep things that way.

The kernel command line is an example of what happens if people get to add stuff in an ad-hoc manner and with little regard to present consistency or compatibility down the road. No wonder nobody knows exactly what the “debug” option is supposed to mean when it was probably added at 2am in the morning someday in 1993 to solve some immediate issue and never actually thought through. As far as kernel commandline parameters go, we're now basically stuck with them in the same way that we're stuck with “cut -d“, “awk -F”, and “sort -t”.

Could the “debug drama” have been handled better by everyone concerned? Sure. But piling all the blame on Kay Sievers doesn't do it for me.