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It would be possible to maintain this as a lodable module out of tree if needed, so even me, who's all in favour of keeping all the old stuff, can agree that it
by lokedhs 4y ago
It would be possible to maintain this as a lodable module out of tree if needed, so even me, who's all in favour of keeping all the old stuff, can agree that it makes sense to not have it in the kernel.
- dale_glass 4y agoHaving it as a loadable module means it still has to compile, which means it adds a cost to maintenance work. The cost of obscure functionality can be extremely high. Say your change made this bit stop compiling. Now you might manage to fix the compile error, but how do you know it still works properly? Now you need to figure out how to test it. A formerly simple change can suddenly balloon into seeking out the 5 people in the world who still want this, and making sure they're happy.
- lokedhs 4y agoWhat I meant was that the people who still want it can maintain it. Or at least fund someone to do the maintenance. The point was that just because it's removed from the kernel doesn't mean it has to disappear if there is still interest to keep it up to date.
- dale_glass 4y agoOk, but seems like an odd one to care about. The ELF transition was almost 30 years ago. Most anything earlier than that is in the garbage dump or a museum, and the software runs in a VM.
- lokedhs 4y agoOh I don't really care about it other than from a nostalgia point of view. I started using Linux at 0.99 or so. I don't think I've used anything but ELF since it was introduced. And recent developments have shown that ELF is not a barrier to getting old binaries working (the recent port of Word Perfect for Unix).
- Annatar 4y ago
- tssva 4y agoipx and ncpfs are examples of this. They were removed in 4.18 but have been maintained outside of the kernel. I use the ipx loadable module on a couple of systems running recent kernel versions.