From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail-it1-f196.google.com ([209.85.166.196]:39177 "EHLO mail-it1-f196.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1727451AbeJRPmB (ORCPT ); Thu, 18 Oct 2018 11:42:01 -0400 Received: by mail-it1-f196.google.com with SMTP id m15so5822087itl.4 for ; Thu, 18 Oct 2018 00:42:17 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <87sh13ya8m.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de> References: <006890C4-64D4-4DE2-A1F0-335FFFD585BB@dilger.ca> <878t2wb4dr.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de> <87sh13ya8m.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de> From: Miklos Szeredi Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2018 09:42:17 +0200 Message-ID: Subject: Re: statx(2) API and documentation To: Florian Weimer Cc: Andreas Dilger , Michael Kerrisk , David Howells , Linux FS-devel Mailing List , Linux Kernel Mailing List , Linux API Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 9:39 AM, Florian Weimer wrote: > * 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. Right, API rules maybe are softer. I'll do some patches... Thanks, Miklos