> It breaks nothing.
OOFFF yeah, that is out of touch.
Reminds me of something Linus said
> The gcc people have a BAD attitude. When the meaning of "inline" changed (from a "inline this" to "hey, it's a hint"), the gcc people never EVER said "sorry". They effectively said "screw you".
> Comparing it to the kernel is ludicrous. We care about user-space interfaces to an insane degree. We go to extreme lengths to maintain even badly designed or unintentional interfaces. Breaking user programs simply isn't acceptable. We're _not_ like the gcc developers. We know that people use old binaries for years and years, and that making a new release doesn't mean that you can just throw that out. You can trust us.
Which I think is an important lesson here. About how when you build tools, people build around you and what they have to work with. But I'm surprised this attitude is not more common, because I don't know a single person who is unfazed when changes happen that break their programs/workflow. It's
reasonable for someone to be upset. And not a single person is ever like "no worries, I'll go read the commits first, no need for documentation." (Don't get me started on "my code is so clear it doesn't need documentation" people...).
I think one big issue with all this is that costs are outsourced either to time or someone who isn't you, and this naively makes people believe that there is no cost (and sometimes fight to reject claims of cost. There is always a cost. There's a cost to everything). I wonder how much time and money would be saved if we recognized this. I just don't know how to motivate solving this, as it's non-obvious.
https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gcc_vs_kernel_stability.html