Re: CVS commit: src/share/man/man4

[David Holland <dholland-sourcechanges%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 07:44:17PM +0300, Jukka Ruohonen wrote:
 > > And why should GENERIC *not* support hardware that is available, works,
 > > and is of use to someone?  If GENERIC is to support only the idea of
 > > what an OS should look for some developers, why do we ship GENERIC at
 > > all and not tell folks to create their own kernels?
 > 
 > I don't disagree on principle.[1] But sooner or later you end up with
 > tremendous amount legacy stuff and things that 0.001 % of people use.
 > And then people go and compile their own kernels because of that.

The purpose of GENERIC is (and has been since before Linux was
invented) to include all drivers and features that can reasonably be
expected to work. Drivers and other code that are commented out in
GENERIC (or not present at all) will be assumed to not work. Users and
sysadmins know this. Trying to retrain them all is futile.

There are all sorts of possible ways to address the problem you're
concerned about that don't involve changing around longstanding
conventions.

 > Do you think Linux distributions ship kernels with all their drivers
 > compiled into one monolithic unit? And why not?

The fact that Linux has always done this wrong is not a reason to go
chasing after them and reinventing their mistakes.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost