1-3 mainly apply to modules, which only affect a handful of binaries;
those binaries can be considered "system binaries". /proc, well,
could be a problem, but most user applications only look at
/proc/loadavg which have grown smoothly. /proc/meminfo is probably
the biggest problem, but the old /proc/meminfo was just too broken...
That doesn't mean we should start throwing out random things because
"I'm not using them anymore." THE biggest complaint commercial
vendors have had with Linux has been the instability of the ABI, and
this is something we need to be very, very sensitive to. I heard
someone say, not too long ago, that two years was a reasonable time to
keep the ABI compatible. That is nonsense -- 5 years is a minimum,
and I would go for 10 years. Especially for corporations with
in-house software, running a two-year-old binary next to a brand new
one is an everyday occurrence.
-hpa
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