I wasn’t clear and that seems to have cause some confusion. I was talking about the Linux kernel itself, and only the Linux kernel.
There are two sides to the Linux kernel: internal exposed to drivers and such, external syscalls exposed to the public. That’s what I was talking about.
All bets are off with 3rd party software. That’s just a general problem in software development. It’s not specific to Linux, and it’s why vendoring libraries is recommended.
This is why all the 3rd party software is frozen at a point-in-time with fixes backported in distros like Debian or RHEL. It fixes the problems of devs being mercurial. The distro is the SDK. It creates a stable base, and it works rather well.
Unfortunately, most software relies on libc and a compiler. Both of which can be problems, and both of which are external to the Linux kernel. There’s not much which relies on only kernel syscalls.
I wasn’t clear and that seems to have cause some confusion. I was talking about the Linux kernel itself, and only the Linux kernel.
There are two sides to the Linux kernel: internal exposed to drivers and such, external syscalls exposed to the public. That’s what I was talking about.
All bets are off with 3rd party software. That’s just a general problem in software development. It’s not specific to Linux, and it’s why vendoring libraries is recommended.
This is why all the 3rd party software is frozen at a point-in-time with fixes backported in distros like Debian or RHEL. It fixes the problems of devs being mercurial. The distro is the SDK. It creates a stable base, and it works rather well.
Unfortunately, most software relies on libc and a compiler. Both of which can be problems, and both of which are external to the Linux kernel. There’s not much which relies on only kernel syscalls.