[systemd-devel] providing backwards compatibility

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 17.01.14 13:20, Simon McVittie (simon.mcvittie at collabora.co.uk) wrote:

> 
> On 17/01/14 09:42, Kay Sievers wrote:
> > This year will bring huge flag day compat breaks. We will drop all old
> > D-Bus support, we will require on a bleeding edge kernel, and so on.
> 
> Flag-day compatibility breaks are a massive pain for
> distributions. The

Note that it is only some distributions which have a problem with
distro-wide changes like this. In Fedoraland it is a lot more common to
patch things through the entire distribution or rebuild all users of a
library on upgrade. 

I certainly do understand that Debian does thigns differently here though.

> The kernel's policy is "don't break userspace" - isn't the init(1)
> equivalent "don't break the rest of userspace"?

Well, see the "-lrt" libc transition. I am not sure we should be held to
higher standards there than libc...

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat