On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 02:36:15PM -0500, Neil Horman wrote: > Hey all- > A few days ago, I was lamenting the fact that, when reviewing patches I > would frequently complain about ABI changes that were actually considered safe > because they were part of the EXPERIMENTAL api set. John M. asked me then > what > I might do to improve the situation, and the following patch set is a proposal > that I've come up with. > > In thinking about the problem I identified two issues that I think we > can improve on in this area: > > 1) Make experimental api calls more visible in the source code. That is to > say, > when reviewing patches, it would be nice to have some sort of visual reference > that indicates that the changes being made are part of an experimental API and > therefore ABI concerns need not be addressed > > 2) Make experimenal api usage more visible to consumers of the DPDK, so that > they can make a more informed decision about the API's they consume in their > application. We make an effort to document all the experimental API's, but > there is no guarantee that a user will check the documentation before making > use > of a new library. > > This patch set attempts to achieve both of the above goals. To do this I've > added an __experimental macro tag, suitable for inserting into api forward > declarations and definitions. > > The presence of the tag in the header and c files where the api code resides > increases the likelyhood that any patch submitted against them will include > the > tag in the context, making it clear to reviewers that ABI stability isn't a > concern here. > > > Also, This tag marks each function it is used on with an attibute causing any > use of the fuction to emit a warning during the build > with a message indicating that the API call in question is not yet part of the > stable interface. Developers can then make an informed decision to suppress > that warning or not. > > Because there is internal use of several experimental API's, this set also > includes a new override macro ALLOW_EXPERIMENTAL_APIS to automatically > suprress these warnings. I think its fair to assume that, for internal use, > we > almost always want to suppress these warnings, as by definition any change to > the apis (even their removal) must be done in parallel with an appropriate > change in the calling locations, lest the dpdk build itself break. > > Neil > > --- > Change Notes: > v2) > * Cleaned up checkpatch errors > * Added Allowance for building experimental on BSD > * Swapped Patch 3 and 4 so that we didn't have a commit level that issued > warnings/errors without need > > v3) > * On suggestion from Bruce, modify ALLOW_EXPERIMENTAL_APIS to be defined in > CFLAGS rather than a makefile variable. This is more flexible in that it > allows us to suppress this specific feature rather than all uses of the > deprecated attribute, as we might use it for other features in the furute >
Despite the fact that this is making yet more work for porting to a new build system, I think this is a good idea to have. As such, Acked-by: Bruce Richardson <bruce.richard...@intel.com>
