Re: [RESEND][PATCH] Add /proc/mempool to display mempool usage

On Tue, 2008-12-02 at 00:02 +0200, Pekka Enberg wrote:

Hi Linus,

On Mon, 1 Dec 2008, Pekka Enberg wrote:

quoted

quoted

Hmm, I thought Documentation/ABI/ was supposed to tell us what's an
ABI you can depend on and what's not. I mean, you shouldn't be
depending on anything but the interfaces documented in
Documentation/ABI/stable/, no?

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 10:12 PM, Linus Torvalds
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Who is the f*cking MORON that thinks that "documentation" has any meaning
what-so-ever?

Me, I suppose. At least that's the impression I got when being asked
to document any new kmemtrace debugfs files, for example.

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 10:12 PM, Linus Torvalds
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

The fact that something is documented (whether correctly or not) has
absolutely _zero_ impact on anything at all. What makes something an ABI
is that it's useful and available. The only way something isn't an ABI is
by _explicitly_ making sure that it's not available even by mistake in a
stable form for binary use.

OK, but why do we have those different ABI "stages" in
Documentation/ABI then? The README file there seems to contradict what
you say. Or maybe I'm reading it wrong...

If the terrain and the map do not agree, follow the terrain. – Swedish
army manual.

If code uses a public interface and we break that interface, we will get
unhappy users. Putting stuff in debugfs/ in a released kernel makes it
public. That's the terrain.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.

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