Re: statx(2) API and documentation

Miklos Szeredi
2018-10-18T07:42:21Z

On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 9:39 AM, Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote:
> * Miklos Szeredi:
>
>> On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 12:22 AM, Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> 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