From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Inaky Perez-Gonzalez Subject: Re: [PATCH 02/39] wimax: declarations for the in-kernel WiMAX API Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 18:07:31 -0800 Message-ID: <200812021807.31959.inaky@linux.intel.com> References: <68881c1af06f352dc457485c208662a8db62f3fe.1227691434.git.inaky@linux.intel.com> <1227778323.3809.19.camel@johannes.berg> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: netdev To: Johannes Berg Return-path: Received: from mga07.intel.com ([143.182.124.22]:39507 "EHLO azsmga101.ch.intel.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752812AbYLCCL3 (ORCPT ); Tue, 2 Dec 2008 21:11:29 -0500 In-Reply-To: <1227778323.3809.19.camel@johannes.berg> Content-Disposition: inline Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Thursday 27 November 2008, Johannes Berg wrote: > Why bother versioning the API? Since this is generic netlink, and things > are looked up by the family name, a completely new version would just > use a new family name and be done with it, old userspace won't even > _find_ that new "version" of the API. That'd be a way to do majors -- hadn't thought about it. But then, it forces a way to create "a way to grok versions" in the family name, which is moving the problem from one place to the other. Because parsing in the family means having to set a protocol and parsing ASCII, I'd say it's easier to use the family's version field, as it is available. > The "minor version" seems also > useless, either you can do the change in a backward compatible way or > you cannot and need to provide compat code. No it is not -- you are missing the case of adding an API call/signal. Addition doesn't break backwards compatibility, yet a user that requires the addition has to double check it is available. -- Inaky