In any case, we have to document that behavior that existed since the very beginning. Because it would be even *worse* if someone would develop against a new kernel and would get a bunch of bug reports when running on literally every old kernel out there :)
So my best guess is that long-term it will create more issues when we change the behavior ... but in any case we have to update the man pages.
No it would not, if you had the fix and did not modify applications that are smart about it then nothing would change. Applications that are smart will work the same on both patched and unpatched kernels while applications that have the bug will suddenly have the behaviour they would have expected from the documentation.
See my other mail, this seems to be the expected behavior since the very beginning.
So unless I am missing something important, the only thing to fix here is the documentation.