Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1755251AbbBCJ4V (ORCPT ); Tue, 3 Feb 2015 04:56:21 -0500 Received: from mail-la0-f45.google.com ([209.85.215.45]:46745 "EHLO mail-la0-f45.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752599AbbBCJ4R (ORCPT ); Tue, 3 Feb 2015 04:56:17 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Reply-To: mtk.manpages@gmail.com In-Reply-To: <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> <775BBA28-BEDF-4F53-A845-D11F4337026B@dilger.ca> From: "Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2015 10:55:55 +0100 Message-ID: Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 1/1] ioctl-fat.2: new manpage for the ioctl fat API To: Andreas Dilger Cc: Heinrich Schuchardt , Ogawa Hirofumi , Linux Filesystem Development List , LKML , linux-man Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2037 Lines: 50 On 3 February 2015 at 10:48, Andreas Dilger wrote: > 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. 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-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/