Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] [nomination] Move Fast and Oops Things

[Matt Fleming <matt@console-pimps.org>]

On Wed, 21 May, at 01:36:55AM, Dan Williams wrote:
> 
> My straw man is something like the following for driver "foo"
> 
> if (gatekeeper_foo_new_awesome_sauce)
>    do_new_thing();
> 
> Where setting gatekeeper_foo_new_awesome_sauce taints the kernel and
> warns that there is no guarantee of this functionality being present
> in the same form or at all going forward.

This kind of thing is done all the time for web developemnt - I think
it's given the name "feature bit".

It makes sense when you control the execution environment, like a web
server, and if things explode you can detect that on the web server end,
and not necessarily require your user to report the problem. It also
makes a lot of sense for continuous deployment, where the master branch
is always the branch used in production.

When a user needs to actively enable this feature and report problems
it's just like another CONFIG_* option, and I'm not sure that's an
improvement.

-- 
Matt Fleming, Intel Open Source Technology Center