On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 08:38:50AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > On Sat, 8 Aug 2009, Greg KH wrote: > > > ... LDD3 is one of the top selling Linux books for the publisher. > > It's a matter of time and figuring out the best way to produce the > > next volume of the book in a manner that is not going to cause it to > > go instantly out of date like the previous version did. > > > > Just publishing a new version in dead-tree form would not make much > > sense anymore as the rate of change in the kernel is increasing so > > fast that it doesn't make any sense. > > at the risk of saying something idiotic, why *should* LDD4 be out of > date almost the instant it hits the shelves? if the underlying kernel > code is really changing that quickly to olsolete the book, that > strikes me as a *really* bad sign of kernel instability. Sorry, but have you read Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt before? If not, please do so, it will answer this question for you. Also note, the rate of change for the kernel has _increased_ dramatically over the past few years, so that anything that is written down goes out of date faster than it used to in the past. That's just a side affect (or is it effect?) of our rapid development model. > note: i'm not talking about the obvious *new* features that are > being added constantly to the kernel. obviously, that's going to > happen. but is it really true that you can't even write a book on > *basic* kernel device drivers without seeing it out of date that > quickly? i thought the whole point of the kernel API was that it > remain relatively stable for *developers*, regardless of what might > happen internally. No, not at all, please read the above file for why. > anyone should be able to see that a published book on device drivers > will probably become *incomplete* fairly quickly. but is that really > the same as saying that it's going to become *wrong*? If you consider examples that do not build anymore due to compiler warnings and errors "wrong", then yes, that is the case. thanks, greg k-h -- To unsubscribe from this list: send an email with "unsubscribe kernelnewbies" to ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxx Please read the FAQ at http://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ
