Document the need to add the __experimental tag to appropriate functions Signed-off-by: Neil Horman <nhor...@tuxdriver.com> CC: Thomas Monjalon <tho...@monjalon.net> CC: "Mcnamara, John" <john.mcnam...@intel.com> CC: Bruce Richardson <bruce.richard...@intel.com> --- doc/guides/contributing/versioning.rst | 14 ++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 14 insertions(+)
diff --git a/doc/guides/contributing/versioning.rst b/doc/guides/contributing/versioning.rst index 400090628..b4de9ed04 100644 --- a/doc/guides/contributing/versioning.rst +++ b/doc/guides/contributing/versioning.rst @@ -50,6 +50,20 @@ those new APIs and start finding issues with them, new DPDK APIs will be automatically marked as ``experimental`` to allow for a period of stabilization before they become part of a tracked ABI. +Note that marking an API as experimental is a multi step process. To mark an API +as experimental, the symbols which are desired to be exported must be placed in +an EXPERIMENTAL version block in the corresponding libraries' version map +script. Secondly, the corresponding definitions of those exported functions, and +their forward declarations (in the development header files), must be marked +with the __rte_experimental tag (see rte_compat.h). The DPDK build makefiles +perform a check to ensure that the map file and the C code reflect the same +list of symbols. This check can be circumvented by defining +ALLOW_EXPERIMENTAL_API during compilation in the corresponding library Makefile. + +In addition to tagging the code with __rte_experimental, the +doxygen markup must also contain the EXPERIMENTAL string, and the MAINTAINER +file should note that the library contains EXPERIMENTAL APIs. + ABI versions, once released, are available until such time as their deprecation has been noted in the Release Notes for at least one major release cycle. For example consider the case where the ABI for DPDK 2.0 has been -- 2.14.3
