On Fri, 2006-11-10 at 19:43 +0000, Alan wrote:
> > Yes, but it is one thing to say you might need to make a binary
> > interface change every few years or on every even/odd minor
> > version number change. It's something else to say you need to
> > change it daily or even in the middle of a distribution build
> > that itself has only a 6-month expected lifespan.
>
> The ABI changes every build. That avoids lots of ugly thunking and hash
> tables and hacks to keep ABI. The API is fairly stable unless you go
> digging deep but does change over time as we fix/improve things.
>
> We do care about the API, but the ABI is irrelevant in an open source
> world, and very very hard to maintain.
But, as you may have noticed, a rather small percent of people choose
to limit themselves to an 'open source world'. What that means
for the rest of us is that we will have to keep supporting
Microsoft for the rest of our lives - and putting up with their
problems.
> Red Hat Enterprise Linux does
> maintain it, and this limits what features can be added and is extremely
> challenging.
Whatever happened to the idea of doing disruptive changes in odd minor
number kernels? From a user's perspective, a driver change is
disruptive once you get to the point where one works correctly.
Is Xen going to make this better or worse? I've always wanted to
install a base OS once per piece of hardware and never change it
unless I add new hardware capabilities. But all the packaged
distributions make me install new kernels if I want a current
firefox even if I have no use for the new kernel capabilities or
(as has been the case with fedora a few times) the new kernel won't
work with my running hardware.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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