On Feb 3, 2015, at 2:21 AM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) <mtk.manpages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 3 February 2015 at 09:49, Andreas Dilger <adilger@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> On Jan 23, 2015, at 12:54 PM, Heinrich Schuchardt <xypron.glpk@xxxxxx> 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. Cheers, Andreas -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
