On Thu, Jan 11, 2024 at 10:57:18PM +0000, Matthew Wilcox wrote: > On Wed, Jan 10, 2024 at 05:47:20PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > No, because the whole idea of "let me mark something deprecated and > > then not just remove it" is GARBAGE. > > > > If somebody wants to deprecate something, it is up to *them* to finish > > the job. Not annoy thousands of other developers with idiotic > > warnings. > > What would be nice is something that warned about _new_ uses being > added. ie checkpatch. Let's at least not make the problem worse. For now, we've just kind of "dealt with it". For things that show up with new -W options we've enlisted sfr to do the -next builds with it explicitly added (but not to the tree) so he could generate nag emails when new warnings appeared. That could happen if we added it to W=1 builds, or some other flag like REPORT_DEPRECATED=1. Another ugly idea would be to do a treewide replacement of "func" to "func_deprecated", and make "func" just a wrapper for it that is marked with __deprecated. Then only new instances would show up (assuming people weren't trying to actively bypass the deprecation work by adding calls to "func_deprecated"). :P Then the refactoring to replace "func_deprecated" could happen a bit more easily. Most past deprecations have pretty narrow usage. This is not true with the string functions, which is why it's more noticeable here. :P -Kees -- Kees Cook
