From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1758220Ab3BYOgn (ORCPT ); Mon, 25 Feb 2013 09:36:43 -0500 Received: from mail-pa0-f52.google.com ([209.85.220.52]:33620 "EHLO mail-pa0-f52.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1754120Ab3BYOgm (ORCPT ); Mon, 25 Feb 2013 09:36:42 -0500 Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2013 06:37:30 -0800 From: Greg Kroah-Hartman To: Stefano Stabellini Cc: Dongsheng Song , Kees Cook , LKML , Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk , Jeremy Fitzhardinge , Thomas Gleixner , Ingo Molnar , "H. Peter Anvin" , "x86@kernel.org" , "xen-devel@lists.xensource.com" , "virtualization@lists.linux-foundation.org" , Mukesh Rathor Subject: Re: [PATCH] arch/x86/xen: remove depends on CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL Message-ID: <20130225143730.GC14007@kroah.com> References: <20130223072959.GA4894@www.outflux.net> <20130224144017.GB1111@kroah.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 12:39:27PM +0000, Stefano Stabellini wrote: > On Sun, 24 Feb 2013, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote: > > > > You should not have unstable options in the kernel in the first place, > > sorry. > > With the premise that the removal of CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL is not an issue > for me personally or my work, I am going to give you my 2 cents on the > matter, but feel free to ignore them :) > > While I understand that CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL has been abused, I feel that > rejecting everything that is not fully stable and with external > interfaces set in stones, might hinder the development of new features. It's been this way for _years_ this isn't something new (the "you have to get it right really quickly" problem). See Documentation/ABI/ for some words about how you can try to do this. > After all, given how fast the kernel is moving nowadays, No faster than it has in the past. > maintaining a project out-of-tree until is completely ready for > production can be very expensive. Merging the project earlier and > completing the development upstream can bring better results. Yes, but don't go changing user-visable apis when you do so. That's been a hard rule for a LONG time. > But in these cases one wouldn't want to "market" the feature as stable > yet, because it just isn't. If CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL is going away, is > there anything in the kernel that can be used to tag a feature as "I > wouldn't use it in production if I were you"? Maybe just a comment in > the kconfig description? I know this is hard, I've had my own problems with it in the past. You don't know if you get an api right until you have a lot of users. See our previous "discussions" about this topic on lkml if you are curious as to the eventual outcome of threads like this: Yes, it's hard, but that's kernel programming. Sorry, greg k-h