It's not clear to me either. From John's replies it also seemed to be an OpenSUSE bug.
On the other hand, if it's bad enough it certainly makes sense to treat it as a kernel bug. The difficulty lies in finding where to draw the line.
On the other hand, if it's bad enough it certainly makes sense to treat it as a kernel bug. The difficulty lies in finding where to draw the line.
> All that afaics doesn't matter. If a new kernel breaks things for people > (that especially includes people that do not update their userland) > then it's a kernel regression, even if the root of the problem is in > usersland. Linus (CCed) said that often enough
[1] http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1710.3/02487.html
From: https://felipec.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/the-linux-way/
You're welcome to assume forever that there will be a version field, if it ever becomes the case that this simply makes no sense anymore then a sensible dummy value will be placed in[0]
[0] - http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1710.3/02487.html
"There's a number of fields in /proc/<pid>/stat that are printed out as zeroes, simply because they don't even *exist* in
the kernel any more, or because showing them was a mistake (typically an information leak). But the numbers got replaced
by zeroes, so that the code that used to parse the fields still works."Opera "fixed" the problem by having version 10 report itself as version 9.80 in the user-agent string.
Because time is a flat circle, the same thing happened when Microsoft was planning the successor to Windows 8. Too many programs saw "Windows 9" and thought the OS was Windows 95 or 98, and tried to use outdated versions of APIs (or refused to launch). So Windows skipped a version and that's why the current version is called Windows 10.
So to answer your question: There is precedent for that scenario.
It's clearly an error on the part of the kernel if the owner of said kernel has specific expectations of behaviour on upgrade with respect to user spaces and those are not being met.
The contract in this case is that there will always be a version number, and anyone who expects it not to change is an idiot or just being obtuse.
> anyone who expects it not to change is an idiot or just being obtuse
If this was the case, Microsoft would have never had to skip from Windows 8 to Windows 10 (see below in another comment: "starts with Windows 9" was used in the wild to detect Windows 95/98).
> anyone who expects it not to change
And you appear to be using an example of a version-change curiosity as a counterexample. It is not a counterexample, because the version number in question changed from 8 to 10. In my original formulation, anyone who claimed to worry that the number would stay 8 forever was being an idiot or being obtuse.
I think that holds up. It was not part of my comment, but someone who expected it to be 9 would not be an idiot or obtuse, because that would have been a reasonable guess, absent additional information. They were expecting it to change but were surprised by an exceptional circumstance.
But this is getting a bit silly; there may be someone out there who thinks version numbers should be immutable across versions, but I bet they're pretty lonely. It was an example picked up while making a wider point.
So yes, if you had a significantly deployed app that segfaults because the version number >= 4.14, Linux probably would seriously consider workarounds for your app.
1: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
Damn it, you can still install Windows 10 in 32-bit form on a modern x86 CPU and expect win16 binaries to work.
The only reason there is a problem with the 64-bit form is that AMD made the 64-bit mode and the 16-bit mode mutually exclusive. You can jump from 64-bit to 32-bit mode, or from 32 to 16, but not from 64 to 16.
The problem is that apparently this is true for all of OpenSUSE, Debian and Ubuntu, and that's when a userspace bug becomes in practice a kernel regression.