On the sickness of our community

It certainly *would* be wonderful if that would be at all feasible. Of course it isn't. But trying to clean up a bit in the swamp of boot-time command-line options (which is a mish-mash of options to the kernel, kernel modules, the boot loader and init) is (in my opinion) quite far from stuff like ioctl, cgroups, *notify, etc.

That said, it's Linus's kernel, and if he decides not to namespace the debug option, then I think that's his prerogative.

PS: It would be kind of nice to have a consistent set of "non-legacy" kernel interfaces (such as you allude to) and an option to disable all the legacy stuff. I wonder how much cleaner & safer software written against such an interface would be.

PPS: Yes, glibc would certainly benefit from removing quite a bit of brainfuck and in cases like gets(3) -- which is not deprecated by LSB, obsoleted by POSIX and removed from C11 -- everyone who do use them should indeed be screwed. But again, wholesale crapectomy would of course be infeasible, unless aiming for a "non-legacy" OS.