[almindor]

This is not correct. The api that was disabled was deprecated for over a decade when disabled. It was an api that wasn't meant to be used. Zol folks kept using it out of tree and when Linus finally removed/hidden them people went apeshit thinking it was some sort of attack. It wasnt, it was 12 years late...

[hexchain]

Quoting Linus himself (https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=189711&curpost...):

> We didn't go out of our way to deliberately break anything.

> But we do occasionally turn symbols that aren't meant to be used outside the kernel into GPL-only, because they have some internal implementation issues.

[rat9988]

An api may not be meant to be used but what makes it important to hide it? They could just let it be until there is a real need to delete it. Just going out of your way to hide something is a bit hard to understand.

[ncmncm]

It is the next step leading up to deleting it.

There are very good reasons to delete unmaintained or hard-to-maintain code that nothing important depends on, or should depend on. But just deleting it creates hardships, so things happen in stages.