Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
f4dd927e5c
The kernel has a "don't break userspace" policy [1] which is very easy to understand and like (even if the details are complicated). We had a complicated policy statement, but the actual practice is that we'll generally avoid changes that cause problems for users. So the whole detailed table is more of a guideline than something that we can rely on. To improve public perception, and to align the docs with practice, let's make a general promise to keep stability, and change the existing table to a "guideline" that tells people which interfaces to use and which not to use so that use and development of systemd don't conflict or create pain. The existing document was very long, and I think it'll have a bigger impact if it shorter. In particular, the chart is dropped, because it was of limited use and severly outdated, because we have added many new interfaces and components without updating it. Adding the missing elements (and then keeping it updated) would be a lot of effort. The chart would be most useful to somebody trying to build a systemd reimplementation, but there haven't been many attempts like this, so let's save the work and drop it and make the document shorter. I also dropped the mentions of Debian. Back in the day, we did indeed adopt many Debian conventions for config files and such, but over the years the scope of the project has grown quite a bit and that part of systemd is a small fraction now. And we've adopted conventions and ideas from many other places too, so we don't mention Debian specifically. [1] https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/reporting-regressions.html
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