Re: [PATCH ethtool] ethtool: support combinations of FEC modes

From: Michal Kubecek <mkubecek@suse.cz>
To: Edward Cree <ecree@solarflare.com>
Cc: "John W. Linville" <linville@tuxdriver.com>,
	netdev <netdev@vger.kernel.org>,
	Ganesh Goudar <ganeshgr@chelsio.com>,
	Jakub Kicinski <jakub.kicinski@netronome.com>,
	Dustin Byford <dustin@cumulusnetworks.com>,
	Dirk van der Merwe <dirk.vandermerwe@netronome.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH ethtool] ethtool: support combinations of FEC modes
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2018 17:56:09 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20180919155609.GH3876@unicorn.suse.cz> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <613d954c-d88c-fa20-f436-75625f11a2ae@solarflare.com>

On Wed, Sep 19, 2018 at 04:38:27PM +0100, Edward Cree wrote:
> On 19/09/18 15:41, Michal Kubecek wrote:
> > I'm sorry I didn't notice this before the patch was accepted but as it's
> > not in a release yet, maybe it's still not too late.
> >
> > Could I suggest to make the syntax consistent with other options?
> I didn't realise ethtool had any patterns to be consistent with ;)

Way too many, I must say. :-) That is why I wasn't happy about adding
another.

> > I mean rather than a comma separated list to use either
> >
> >   ethtool --set-fec <dev> encoding enc1 enc2 ...
> but yes this looks fine to me, as long as we're reasonably confident that
>  we won't want to add new parameters (that might require determining
>  whether enc2 is an encoding or a parameter name) in the future, because
>  while the parsing wouldn't be impossible it might get ugly.

This problem already exists for "-s ... msglvl". In the parser for the
netlink series I introduced an "end of list" marker (tentatively "--")
for this purpose, perhaps that could be a way.

> I'll rustle up an RFC patch.

Thank you.

Michal Kubecek