new kernel ... / meaning of stable-tracking

Mike (mwester) mwester at dls.net
Mon Sep 29 19:20:29 CEST 2008


Werner Almesberger wrote:
> Mike (mwester) wrote:
>> You are unilaterally making the decision to replace existing
>> functionality with something that provides considerably lesser
>> functionality, yet you have never proven the case that the lost
>> functionality is, in fact, extraneous.
> 
> Heh, they say "it's impossible to prove a negative" :-)
> 
> But do you have an example for a real-life accident where you've
> successfully used the in-kernel power down mechanism and you think
> the experience would have been significantly worse if only neodog
> would have been available ?

Yes, I use it all the time -- in fact, this technique is the easiest way
to determine if a particular failure is a user-space problem, or the "it
failed to resume yet again" problem.

But hey, I've let myself be sucked into this silly discussion -- as you
say, it's impossible to prove a negative -- and I can see quite clearly
that you will refuse to accept anything I have to say on the usefulness
of this feature either.  So we've both made up our minds, and apparently
from each of our perspectives we're both in the right.  The conclusion
is inevitable.

Personally, I think that it would help a lot of these discussions if
Openmoko would get a little closer to the perspective I and the
community have on these problems.  It would really help if all Openmoko
employees would join the IRC channels, if only to listen there.  Listen
and hear what the user community has to say, and I think you'll all be a
little more sensitive to the removal of debugging tools from the kernel,
and the frustrations caused by some of the things we've argued about
over the past months.  Along with that, I think every Openmoko employee
should be required to use a GTA02 as their primary cell phone -- it may
be unbelievable but there are community members who are attempting to do
that.  In particular for those folks, these issues are very real, and
not academic "arguing points".

Hmm... You know, if everyone at Openmoko were to attempt to use the
device as a day-to-day primary cell phone, this entire discussion might
very well be moot, as I suspect that the user-space and kernel might be
rock-solid very shortly, and we wouldn't need this functionality!


Regards,
Mike




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