re: Time to merge the pgoyette-compat branch

[matthew green <mrg%eterna.com.au@localhost>]

congrats getting this fixed up.  i don't like the monolithic module
we have currently ;-)

> * Introduction of module "aliases".  In addition to its own name, a
>    module can now provide alias names.  This is useful for the
>    monolithic compat module, which now contains the functionality of
>    the many version-specific modules.  If you load the monolithic module,
>    its aliases will prevent you from also loading individual-version
>    compat modules.

i'm not sure i understand the point of this.  how does the normal
duplicate symbol detection not cause a failure?  why do we care
about names, vs what is actually imported or exported?  ie, what
happens differently if this change is excluded?  

> * Removed linking of the .o kernel compat library into all kernels.
>    This caused problems, since the library included lots of compat
>    symbols, but did not include module linkage; attempts to subsequently
>    load some modules would fail due to multiply-defined symbols.

can you expand upon this more?  what exactly has changed how?

thanks.


.mrg.