Freeze all the interfaces forever? (was Re: USB device allocation)

david parsons (orc@pell.portland.or.us)
11 Oct 1999 10:16:06 -0700


In article <linux.kernel.3801B0E1.5CB48EF3@dacotec.net>,
Marcin Dalecki <dalecki@dacotec.net> wrote:
>david parsons wrote:
>>
>> In article <linux.kernel.Pine.LNX.4.05.9910081936460.32297-100000@ns.snowman.net>,
>> Stephen Frost <sfrost@ns.snowman.net> wrote:
>> >On 7 Oct 1999, david parsons wrote:
>> >
>> >> I certainly don't; /proc is fast enough even for the various
>> >> 386s I run Linux on, and if I don't want to use those cycles
>> >> I just won't mount /proc.
>> >
>> > And then discover that the latest version of ps doesn't
>> >work...
>>
>> Has kmemps even been supported in recent years?
>
>No it wasn't.
>
>What about other stuff: net-utils and plenty other friends?

Regrettably, I am not familiar with the ``ip'' command and the rest
of the fallout from the wholescale renovation of networking for
2.2+; but at least for netkit-a-0.06, the only tools I can find that
actually _break_ are rarp and netstat (others, like ifconfig, seem
to simply lose their statistics gathering; I'd find out for
certain, except that klogd is someone else that uses /proc when it
can, and thus /proc is locked open for me) while route and the
interface binding parts of ifconfig continue to work.

>> If a useful thing goes into the kernel and the developers of userland
>> tools abandon the old-style interfaces in favor of the new interface,
>> I'm not going to blame the kernel when I take that new interface out
>> and the tools go belly-up.
>
>What about just this: Think TWICE before inventing ANY new interface?

There seem to be a few factions in Linux development; there are at
least experimentalists, traditionalists, compatabilitists, and high
priests. There's not much that gets into the kernel unless it passes
by members of each of those groups. Networking and kernel interfaces
seem to be pretty firmly in the experimentalist camp, but the rest of
the developer world seems to be pretty evenly split between most of
those four factions.

Think twice? That's simple, it's done all the time. And then what?

____
david parsons \bi/ experimentalist/compatabilitist.
\/

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