Re: [MiNT] freemint-enhancements merge ??

[Alan Hourihane <alanh@fairlite.co.uk>]

On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 15:33 +0100, Vincent Rivière wrote:
> Alan Hourihane a écrit :
> > To be honest, I don't think we should be trying to support older XFS
> > modules (or even XDD etc) from older kernels with a new kernel. They
> > should be stamped with a kernel version and only work with that kernel
> > version to avoid problems. 
> > 
> > Linux started out like this and now has very strict versioning of kernel
> > modules with the installed kernel, and we should at least version ours
> > too.
> 
> I totally agree. Compatibility sucks.

It's not just compatibility. Developers won't go back fixing bugs in
older kernel modules with new kernels. There's just not enough of us to
do it. The easy answer is upgrade everything. It's still nice to have
modules because not everyone needs all functionality.

> However a strict versioning like Linux may be too strong.
> Maybe we could put some "module api version" in the kernel, and 
> increment it whenever a kernel release breaks this API ?

I'd be o.k. with this, but sometimes it might be a little illusive when
an API is broken.

> Then in the modules, we would check the compatibility with the API 
> version and fail if they are not compatible...
> 
> The other solution would be to break the compatibility and do nothing 
> special. If someone has the bad idea of mixing modules from different 
> kernels, the system will crash. No mercy for suicidal people.

Yikes.

Alan.