Date: Sat, 5 Apr 1997 15:54:20 +0100 (BST) From: Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: Peter Dufault <dufault@hda.com>, current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Breaking the lkm DISPATCH macro Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.95q.970405155123.8538F-100000@herring.nlsystems.com> In-Reply-To: <4365.860244136@time.cdrom.com>
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On Sat, 5 Apr 1997, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > > Does this mean that my OSS module will stop working? Sigh.. > > That brings up a very good point, which is that we need to start > thinking about contacting vendors when we do stuff which will cause > their stuff to break. I realize that everyone can't keep track of > every single commercial product available for FreeBSD (not that it's > exactly *hard* right now though :) and its dependencies, so all I'm > asking is that if a user (like Doug here) raises an advance concern or > we start getting bug reports from our early BETA customers WRT some > commercial product, that should raise a *really big red flag* with us. > > The commercial sector contains some of our best current and potential > allies, and the last thing we need to do is alienate them by breaking > interfaces without at least trying to contact their developers in > advance or working out *some* sort of arrangement. Don't make their > customers be the first ones to tell them that FreeBSD busted their > software, eh? ;-) > I totally agree. Developers ought to be *very* careful when changing kernel data structures. I don't want to get too religious about back compatibility (we aren't Windoze after all) but if a couple of minutes thought can preserve binary compatibility, then it is a couple of minutes well spent. > In this case it's not such a big deal since OSS is not currently > guaranteed to run under 3.0, nor is 3.0 mentioned as supported in any > way, so one could argue that user of it were on thin ice anyway. What > *would* be a big deal, however, would be if it took Hannu until the > actual release day of 3.0 to find out about the incompatibility! :-) It works pretty well on 3.0 though :-) -- Doug Rabson Mail: dfr@nlsystems.com Nonlinear Systems Ltd. Phone: +44 181 951 1891
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