RFC: ABI break

[Aurelien Jarno]

On Fri, Dec 30, 2005 at 09:41:06AM +0100, Robert Millan wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 29, 2005 at 09:09:59PM +0100, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> > > Expected etch release is after 12 months,
> > > these days might be kernel of FreeBSD 6.x the preferred one.
> > 
> > Maybe yes, but currently it is not yet usable, so doing changes that may
> > break support for FreeBSD 5.4 give me some fear. If we could have a
> > FreeBSD 6.x that proves to work well, I am not against making such
> > changes. That's why I prefer such changes to be done later.
> 
> Why don't we just take the same approach as upstream?  If upstream considers
> 6.x stable enough to deprecate 5.4 completely, then so do we?
> 
Well, I would prefer to do that only if also 6.x is stable enough for
us. Currently that doesn't seems to be the case as openpty() does not
work, the userland tools (kldutils for example) have not been ported or
well tested in version 5.4 on a 6.x kernel. Moreover the 6.x kernel has
been tested by very few persons, maybe it brokes some things.

That's why I think we should stick to kernel 5.4 (at least wrt to
kfreebsd-kernel-headers, it seems it possible to support the two kernels
on the glibc using versioning). When everything does work with 6.x, we 
could deprecate 5.4. But no before. And also that's mean we need a period
where the two kernels are supported.

-- 
  .''`.  Aurelien Jarno	            | GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
 : :' :  Debian developer           | Electrical Engineer
 `. `'   aurel32 at debian.org         | aurelien at aurel32.net
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