* Amir Goldstein: > On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 4:11 PM Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> Constants of the *_ALL type can be actively harmful due to the fact that >> developers will usually fail to consider the possible effects of future >> changes to the definition. >> >> Remove STATX_ALL from the uapi, while no damage has been done yet. >> > > Look. When Linus says "let's see if somebody notices" and referring to ABI > it means sooner or later someone will upgrade to newer kernel and complain > if something breaks. > > But what does it mean with UAPI change? How often do people > re-build existing programs? I, for one, build master for my > testing, but never install uapi headers from master. I just can't > wrap my head around the backward compatibiltiy nightmare a change > like this could create. So it appears that people use #ifdef STATX_ALL to check for struct statx availability. So the backwards compatibility impact is that you silently lose features in a consistent manner, which is very hard to spot. 8-( Probably not a good idea, then.
