Re: [Call For Wartectomy] CRLF conversion out of kernel

david parsons (o.r.c@p.e.l.l.p.o.r.t.l.a.n.d.o.r.u.s)
14 Jul 1999 14:50:52 -0700


In article <linux.kernel.19990714223326.L2120@loth.demon.co.uk>,
Steve Dodd <dirk@loth.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>On Wed, Jul 14, 1999 at 11:48:40AM -0700, david parsons wrote:
>
>> Sure, you can do things the MS-Windows way and arbitrarily break
>> compatability from one version of Linux to the next (certainly this
>> would be nothing new -- software engineering died of a buzzword
>> overdose early in the 1990s -- but it would be nice to be able to
>> recommend Linux in terms more glowing than "well, it's Unix, I
>> guess.")
>
>So we gradually let the project die under the weight of years of accumulated
>cruft instead?

Get back to me in a decade and ask the same question.

Broken behavior in one filesystem is not the "weight of years of
accumulated cruft".

>It's good to clear out (some of the) cruft in a major revision; if you
>don't like it then may I kindly point you at 2.2.10, or 2.0.37, or 1.2.13.

Hey, if I could take 2.2.x device drivers and plug them into
1.2.13, I'd do that and get 220k back on my install floppies. But,
oddly enough, there have been 4 releases of the kernel since then
with 4 different device driver interfaces (and nothing but paranoia
and contempt for any attempts to publish a driver interface), so
nothing will work without massive hackery.

But why the devil should I reward sloppy coding practices by taking
all my toys and playing with a different crowd? Even if Linux
wasn't Unix's only hope, there are massive benefits to making it
easy to upgrade to new kernels.

____
david parsons \bi/ Sheesh.
\/

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