Charles 'Buck' Krasic wrote:

>You can argue that any API is subtly error prone.
>
You can also argue that the earth is flat.  It's just that some 
arguments have more basis than others.

>With /dev/epoll, it is perfectly feasible to write user level
>wrapper libraries that help avoid the potential pitfalls.
>
In other words, you don't deny the problem.  Instead, you work around it 
in user space.

Better to fix the API.  The kernel has more information than user space 
and can do a better job.  In the kernel, the problem can be fixed once 
and for all, not over and over again in each different wrapper library. 
 It's not even as if the change would break programs correctly written 
to the old API, not that we particularly care about programs written to 
the old API.