On 3 February 2015 at 10:48, Andreas Dilger <adilger@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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. 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/ -- 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
