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by lovich 2839 days ago
No offense but this seems like blinding fanaticism for a man who is, admitedly right 99.99999% of the other time, not perfect.

In this case however you are arguing that when he said, "we don't break userland, period" he instead meant the opposite? There was no asterix on his statement saying to read the fine print.
2 comments
LukeShu 2839 days ago
What he said was (AFAICT, the exact "we don't break userland, period" wording only appears in this HN thread. Let's go with the rant that I believe the GP was referencing):

The "first rule of kernel maintenance":

    If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the
    kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs.
Then later, to drive home the point:

    WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!
So, sure, "there was no asterix on his statement saying to read the fine print"--he did better than an asterisk and fine print, he made it part of the main content.
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wolf550e 2839 days ago
By "userland" Linus meant actual users of the Linux kernel, not all possible theoretical users of the Linux kernel. For example, if there is a program that just uses quirks of implementation to fingerprint the kernel version, it will get broken all the time and will need updating every kernel release, but as long as people's actual servers, phones, desktops and IoT devices keep working without changes, that's not a breaking change.
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