On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 12:00 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 5/27/2010 1:49 PM, m.roth@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>>
>> Sorry, I don't understand what you wrote. How does Linux make it
>> "difficult to impossible"? It's an o/s, with POSIX calls, just like all
>> the other unices. It's not M$, and it's not Apple... so is being neither
>> making it hard?
>
> For one thing, the license terms do not permit including software with
> differing terms (hence no zfs, etc. even though source is freely
> available), and for another the interfaces keep changing so binaries
> can't be expected to work after updates.
>
I'm not sure if I have the problem or not (don't think so), but I have
to take issue with this last bit (changing interfaces).
I'm running the nvidia driver
dkms-nvidia-x11-drv-185.18.14-1.nodist.rf.x86_64 from Oct 22, 2009,
and IIRC it has survived the 5.4 and 5.5 updates without any problems
at all. Perhaps that's because dkms rebuilds the driver for each new
kernel, but even so, the interfaces can't have changed too much if
they still build and work.
When I was working on the Linux kernel directly, one of the least
likely areas of change was the driver interface, precisely because
changes at this level are detrimental to all new driver development
and old driver compatibility. The driver API is fairly well
established and less likely to change than most other fly-by-night
(i.e., M$) OSs. Even the proprietary versions of UNIX don't mess with
this (much). They may be different, but they aren't too variable.
Thus, I find this claim difficult to believe.
Do you have examples? Proof?
Cheers.
mhr
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