From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from albireo.enyo.de ([5.158.152.32]:51896 "EHLO albireo.enyo.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1727440AbeJRPjH (ORCPT ); Thu, 18 Oct 2018 11:39:07 -0400 From: Florian Weimer To: Miklos Szeredi Cc: Andreas Dilger , Michael Kerrisk , David Howells , Linux FS-devel Mailing List , Linux Kernel Mailing List , Linux API Subject: Re: statx(2) API and documentation References: <006890C4-64D4-4DE2-A1F0-335FFFD585BB@dilger.ca> <878t2wb4dr.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de> Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2018 09:39:21 +0200 In-Reply-To: (Miklos Szeredi's message of "Thu, 18 Oct 2018 09:37:44 +0200") Message-ID: <87sh13ya8m.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: * Miklos Szeredi: > On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 12:22 AM, Florian Weimer wrote: >> * Andreas Dilger: >> >>>> So what's the point exactly? >>> >>> Ah, I see your point... STATX_ALL seems to be mostly useful for the kernel >>> to mask off flags that it doesn't currently understand. It doesn't make >>> much sense for applications to specify STATX_ALL, since they don't have any >>> way to know what each flag means unless they are hard-coded to check each of >>> the STATX_* flags individually. They should build up a mask of STATX_* flags >>> based on what they care about (e.g. "find" should only request attributes >>> based on the command-line options given). >> >> Could you remove it from the UAPI header? I didn't want to put it >> into the glibc header, but was overruled. > > To summarize Linus' rule of backward incompatibility: you can do it as > long as nobody notices. So yeah, we could try removing STATX_ALL from > the uapi header, but we'd have to put it back in, once somebody > complains. I don't recall a rule about backwards-incompatible API changes. This wouldn't impact ABI at all.