Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S933162AbbBCJsk (ORCPT ); Tue, 3 Feb 2015 04:48:40 -0500 Received: from mail-pa0-f42.google.com ([209.85.220.42]:63810 "EHLO mail-pa0-f42.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753796AbbBCJsh convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Tue, 3 Feb 2015 04:48:37 -0500 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Mime-Version: 1.0 (Mac OS X Mail 8.2 \(2070.6\)) Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 1/1] ioctl-fat.2: new manpage for the ioctl fat API From: Andreas Dilger In-Reply-To: Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2015 02:48:34 -0700 Cc: Heinrich Schuchardt , Ogawa Hirofumi , Linux Filesystem Development List , LKML , linux-man Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Message-Id: <775BBA28-BEDF-4F53-A845-D11F4337026B@dilger.ca> References: <1422042884-10824-1-git-send-email-xypron.glpk@gmx.de> <5984550D-1518-490C-9A3F-3F9B1FA2EA00@dilger.ca> To: mtk.manpages@gmail.com X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.2070.6) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1603 Lines: 39 On Feb 3, 2015, at 2:21 AM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote: > On 3 February 2015 at 09:49, Andreas Dilger wrote: >> On Jan 23, 2015, at 12:54 PM, Heinrich Schuchardt 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-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/