linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v3 1/1] ioctl-fat.2: new manpage for the ioctl fat API

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Date:	Tue, 3 Feb 2015 10:55:55 +0100
From:	"Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages@...il.com>
To:	Andreas Dilger <adilger@...ger.ca>
Cc:	Heinrich Schuchardt <xypron.glpk@....de>,
	Ogawa Hirofumi <hirofumi@...l.parknet.co.jp>,
	Linux Filesystem Development List 
	<linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	linux-man <linux-man@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 1/1] ioctl-fat.2: new manpage for the ioctl fat API

On 3 February 2015 at 10:48, Andreas Dilger <adilger@...ger.ca> wrote:
> On Feb 3, 2015, at 2:21 AM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) <mtk.manpages@...il.com> wrote:
>> On 3 February 2015 at 09:49, Andreas Dilger <adilger@...ger.ca> wrote:
>>> On Jan 23, 2015, at 12:54 PM, Heinrich Schuchardt <xypron.glpk@....de> wrote:
>>>> +The bits of the bit mask are
>>>> +.TP
>>>> +.B ATTR_RO
>>>> +This bit specifies that the file or directory is read-only.
>>>
>>> It's too bad that these constants have such generic names. It would
>>> be better to use MSDOS_ATTR_* or FAT_ATTR_*, since these are also
>>> exposed to userspace, but are only used by FAT.
>>
>> Agreed. Too late now, I guess, though.
>
> It wouldn't be unreasonable to #define FAT_ATTR_* versions of these
> constants for use with new kernels, and eventually deprecate the
> ATTR_* usage as older kernels become obsoleted.  Once the FAT_ATTR_*
> versions had been around for a year or three (enough for a major vendor
> release cycle to get them into some large fraction of users hands) they
> could start being documented in the man pages and the old versions
> documented only for backward compatibility (as with old APIs like
> strcpy(3) or mktemp(3)).
>
> Given that FAT ioctls are not widely used by applications, the
> actual ABI (numeric constants) isn't changing, and the workaround
> is simple, I'd expect that the time before deprecating the old
> constants could be fairly short.

True. And now that we're actually documenting this stuff, it would be
a good time to make the change, so that the new names appear in the
docs.

Hirofumi, what do you think?

Cheers,

Michael



-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/
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