Re: RFC: what's in a stable series?

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 09:16:45PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> >  I reverted the direct IO patches because hch complained on me that they
> >  change the direct IO API, and we really dont want that kind of
> >  change, IMHO.
> 
> OK, we're on to a specific case.  Albeit a very small one.
> 
> I think Trond's direct IO change was right.  The impact on out-of-tree code
> is infinitesimal.  Stick a #define O_DIRECT_NEEDS_A_FILP in the header and
> let the XFS guys write a four-line patch.

Oh, we have that patch even without the feature define in say -ac and -aa
but it's just horrible to have APIs silently change behind you.  Especially
when just changing a function arg where you only get one more warning in
the forrest of warnings produced by gcc 3.3 on a 2.4 tree..

> Or merge XFS.

That's of course a good idea [1] but doesn't really help in this discussion.
There's other filesystems like ocfs or opengfs that have the same kind
of problems.

[1] and with the new quota code and vmap() we're almost there..