Messages in this thread | | | From | BROWN Nick <> | Subject | RE: The WHY's (RE: ide drive w/dma ... system crash) | Date | Wed, 12 May 1999 17:35:23 +0200 |
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>Ah, but the problem is not to fix the utilities - >that is a matter of a few hours at most - >the problem is that five years from now there still >will be people with old versions of the utilities.
I completely understood that. My point was that if the utilities are seen to be sufficiently close to the kernel, we can assume that it will be less than five years before the older versions are no longer being used with new kernels.
For example, every distribution ships with lilo and ?fdisk as part of the base package. The number of people who need to upgrade their kernel but who still keep an old LILO for use with it is, I would submit, very small.
>We should be extremely slow with breaking old stuff. >After all, we claim that Linux is a stable environment - >not only in the sense that it does not crash, but also >in the sense that it is not necessary to install the >latest versions of everything every three months.
I don't think we are "breaking old stuff" too badly. There's already code in setup.S to check who/what loaded us, so presumably this kind of exercise has been done before. Sure, it should be phased in, but I don't think it's beyond reason to fix LILO and FDISK, let the developers of other utilities know where the library is so they can get _correct_ disk geometry (many of them will be pleased to be able to incorporate your experience with disk layouts into their programs), and announce that 2.3.mumble will be the last version that can install a _later_ kernel with on old LILO and without specifying linear geometry.
All software development is a tradeoff between functional advances and backwards compatibility. LILO and FDISK are so fundamental that I reckon they can be counted as almost part of the kernel.
I guess the decision to take functionality out is not something one takes lightly (read: without Linus). But if it has to be done, five years from tomorrow is nearer than five years from next month, I suppose.
Nick Brown, Strasbourg, France (Nick(dot)Brown(at)coe(dot)int)
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