Craig Small wrote:
>
> On Sun, Apr 23, 2000 at 01:16:23PM +0200, Jens David wrote:
> > Iīm happy to announce the 5th attempt of DG2FEF/DG1KJD AX.25
> > for Linux 2.2.14. I originally intended to wait until 2.2.15,
> > but since it seems there are some delays on its release and
> > there are some nasty bugs I nailed down I decided commit the
> > release now.
> > It consists of
> >
> > - the kernel patch
> > - new libax25 (in fact this did not change but I renamed it
> > for consistency issues)
> > - new ax25-tools
> > - new ax25-apps
> Urgh, are they backwards compatible? In other words will these new
> tools work with old kernels? Will old tools work with new kernels?
>
> I'm trying to avoid some giant administrative nightmare here.
Of cause the new kernel needs new tools which will not work with
the old kernel. Thatīs why I released seperate distributions. I
orginally wanted to keep the new tools backward compatible. I modified
the autoconf scripts so that they tried to find out at compile time whether
they were being compiled for old or new AX.25 . I sent the patches to you,
but did not get any response. I concluded that there was no interest. Thus
I became quite sloppy about placing my #ifdefs during further changes.
My future plans are the following:
I will mostly rework the complete packages. There is a lot of conceptionally
wrong stuff in there like dependencies on the stupid axports file and
/proc/*-Entries.
Also, I will remerge ax25-tools and -apps (I do not see the reason to have
two packages here) and call the resulting package ax25-utils again. The
library will have to be completely reworked, too. I do not like those
proc-scanning functions and axports stuff at all. I think I am going to
call this libax25-2, but Iīm not yet completely sure about this.
I know that this will pose a lot of administrative problems. But I will
not accept any performance-compatibility tradeoffs here, except perhaps
the binary compatibility with the old socket interface.
Comments?
Remember the flexnet slogan?: "Itīs like re-inventing the wheel, and doing
it the right way this time."
-- Jens
