Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 10 Jul 2006 16:21:47 +0100 | From | Russell King <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] Clean up old names in tty code to current names |
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On Mon, Jul 10, 2006 at 11:10:32AM -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote: > On Mon, 10 Jul 2006 16:19:06 BST, Alan Cox said: > > Ar Llu, 2006-07-10 am 10:57 -0400, ysgrifennodd Jon Smirl: > > > > A few apps do rely on /proc/tty/drivers for the major-minor > > > > to device name mapping. /dev/vc/0 does not exist (unless > > > > created manually) without devfs. > > > > > > This is why I questioned if /proc/tty was really in use, it contains > > > an entry that is obviously wrong for my system. > > > > Which tools already know about. What is so hard to understand about the > > idea that pointless random changes break stuff and don't fix things. > > On the other hand, a case can be made that if userspace already knows about > the fact the thing is totally broken
Maybe - what if userspace is looking up /dev/tty0 in /proc/tty/drivers and happens to know that it's called /dev/vc/0, because it's working around this known idiosyncrasy of the kernel ? If you change tty/drivers to be the more correct /dev/tty0, such a program would needlessly break.
> fixing it won't break anything.
How can you be certain - I think that's Alan's point (if it isn't, that's my point.) The answer is you can't, so in order to maintain ABI compatibility (and yes, this *IS* part of the kernel ABI) it must be left exactly as-is.
> The only case is that some *already* terminally broken stuff may break > further.
That "terminally broken stuff" might just happen to work with today's kernels. Even so, that's no reason to pile in additional user-visible changes which could potentially have adverse effects.
-- Russell King Linux kernel 2.6 ARM Linux - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/ maintainer of: 2.6 Serial core - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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