Comment by shawnz
6 years ago
So what meets the criteria of being a "special case" and what doesn't? One of the examples that Linus gives is RAID checksumming. How come RAID checksumming is a special case but ZFS checksumming isn't? I don't think it has anything to do with the nature of the usage, the only problem is that the user is ZFS.
RAID checksuming is in the kernel, and when Linus says jump, the RAID folks ask back how high.
He is not going to beg people outside kernel, whether he is allowed to change something that may break their module. On the contrary, they must live with any breackage that is thrown at them.
Again, that symbol was deprecated for well over a decade. How long does it take to be allowed to remove it?
Sometimes in life we do things even though we are not explicitly obligated to do them. Nobody is asking for ZFS to get explicitly maintained support in the Linux kernel. They are simply asking for this one small inconsequential change to be reverted just this one time, since it would literally be no harm to the kernel developers to do so, and it would provide substantial benefits to any user wanting to use ZFS. Furthermore the amount of time that kernel developers have spent arguing in favour of this change has been significantly greater than the time it would have taken to just revert it.
> Again, that symbol was deprecated for well over a decade.
But not the GPL equivalent of the symbol. That symbol is not deprecated.