Re: pcmcia ioctl removal
- From: Willy Tarreau <w@xxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 1 May 2007 11:44:00 +0200
On Tue, May 01, 2007 at 05:16:13AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
On Tue, 1 May 2007, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
pcmcia-delete-obsolete-pcmcia_ioctl-feature.patch
...
Dominik is busy. Will probably re-review and send these direct to Linus.
The patch above is the removal of cardmgr support. While I'd love
to see this cruft gone it definitively needs maintainer judgement on
whether they time has come that no one relies on cardmgr anymore.
since i was the one who submitted the original patch to remove that
stuff, let me make an observation.
when i submitted a patch to remove, for instance, the traffic shaper
since it's clearly obsolete, i was told -- in no uncertain terms --
that that couldn't be done since there had been no warning about its
impending removal.
fair enough, i can accept that.
on the other hand, the features removal file contains the following:
...
What: PCMCIA control ioctl (needed for pcmcia-cs [cardmgr, cardctl])
When: November 2005
...
in other words, the PCMCIA ioctl feature *has* been listed as obsolete
for quite some time, and is already a *year and a half* overdue for
removal.
in short, it's annoying to take the position that stuff can't be
deleted without warning, then turn around and be reluctant to remove
stuff for which *more than ample warning* has already been given.
doing that just makes a joke of the features removal file, and makes
you wonder what its purpose is in the first place.
a little consistency would be nice here, don't you think?
No, it just shows how useless this file is. What is needed is a big
warning during usage, not a file that nobody reads. Facts are :
- 90% of people here do not even know that this file exists
- 80% of the people who know about it do not consult it on a regular basis
- 80% of those who consult it on a regular basis are not concerned
- 75% of statistics are invented
=> only 20% of 20% of 10% of those who read LKML know that one feature
they are concerned about will soon be removed = 0.4% of LKML readers.
If you put a warning in kernel messages (as I've seen for a long time
about tcpdump using obsolete AF_PACKET), close to 100% of the users
of the obsolete code who are likely to change their kernels will notice
it.
I'm sorry for your patch which may get delayed a lot. You would spend
fewer time stuffing warnings in areas affected by scheduled removal.
BTW, I'm not even against the end of cardmgr support, it's just that
I don't know what the alternative is, and I suspect that many users
do not either. A big warning would have brought them to google who
would have provided them with suggestions for alternatives.
Willy
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