>Remember, the whole win of Linux is that it is free and you are not
>locked into any of the sorts of binary dependancies wrt. kernel
>modules and similar, that you would see with some other system.
Well, aside from people who are selling commercial code based on
Linux and who would really really not want be put into a situation
where the whole system needs to be rebuilt and distributed on a
CD-Rom to apply one or two patches (like the situation I'm now
finding myself in with my little commercial product. The system
is annoying some clients by rolling belly-up with mysterious
network problems, and I'd rather roll up to the current 2.0.x release
than attempt to reinvent patches to possible existing problems or
roll back down to 1.2.13 <which works fine, though it doesn't support
quite the same variety of peripherals.>)
If the interfaces stay the same, I'd be a lot more confident that the
functionality through those interfaces stay the same, and thus I'd
only be releasing a kernel packagefile <7mb with required source>
instead of a rebuild of the entire system <90mb with required source>.
____
david parsons \bi/ I'm looking for a full-time kernel kernel/network
\/ programmer. Inquire within.