Re: RFC: what's in a stable series?

[Alan Cox]

On Iau, 2003-07-10 at 04:34, Herbert Pötzl wrote:
> In my opinion (and you requested input *g*), the
> kernel userland API can be changed as much as is
> required to improve/stabilize/bugfix the kernel,
> unless this change breaks something in userland
> without an already available update/upgrade/etc ...

In a lot of cases (like O_DIRECT) its cleaner to simply break the API
in a way that will spew warnings if people miss changes than mess around
with extra methods that instead break drivers that forgot to use C99
initializers.

I plan to carry on breaking the kernel internal API when I have to
and its easy to fix up the few affected users. I broke all the audio
drivers between 2.4.21->22 but that was worth doing for example.