Re: devfs

[Alexander Viro]

On Tue, 12 Nov 2002, Rando Christensen wrote:

> Rather than saying "Devfs sucks, and we can't do anything about it other
> than fix it's more minor problems because we're in feature freeze", we
> should be saying "devfs sucks; we're a little late for feature freeze,
> so let's clean up what we can and work on something much better for the
> next time around."

Whatever is going to happen with devfs, believe me, the first thing
you'll need is stable glue in drivers - as simple and natural from the
driver POV as possible.  Complexity of doing development in 2.6 will
directly depend on the amount of code in drivers touched by patches.
BTDT - one can carry (and gradually merge) deep rewrites of core code
during -STABLE if it's done carefully.  But as soon as your patchset
hits the drivers - you are in for a world of pain just porting it to
next versions.

_That_ is critical - get interfaces right in -CURRENT, so that further
work would not cross these boundaries; then work in the resulting areas
becomes independent.  

And in situations like that of devfs, simple rules for callers are pretty
much the main criteria - if users of the interface have to jump through
some hoops, it's a sign that interface needs changes...