Darren Reed writes: > In PSARC reviews today, we have three primary levels of classifying > an interface's stability: Committed, Uncommitted and (Project) Private.
Don't forget about the important distinction between Project Private and Consolidation Private, as well as Volatile interfaces and the Contracted modifier. There are *MANY* more options than the three you suggest. > Of these three, I'm concerned that over use of Private can make it > harder for us (OpenSolaris) to build developer based communities. This has been a tension from the beginning of time. It really has nothing to do with OpenSolaris. The tension is between the developer of some feature, who generally wants to have some control over the portions of his code that must remain immutable (because others depend on them), and the developer of some dependent feature, who likely wants as much internal access as the first one is willing to grant. If we swing things too far towards the latter guy (as your references to "communities" seem to suggest), then the former guy is hosed. Things that he thought he could change, things that were part of his internal implementation, were just nailed to the wall. Too bad -- no more innovation for you. > The primary interface that got me thinking about this is GLDv3 > and the associated MAC interfaces. Having them labelled "private" This is a well-known and ancient problem. It's not OpenSolaris. The problem is that project teams naturally resist nailing things down when they're really not quite done with development. The ARC can (and should) push only so hard on them. The ARC is in no position to hire new staff for project teams that are understaffed or tell management what the schedule should be. > The simpler version of these questions are: > - should there be something between Private and Uncommitted? There already are multiple choices between those -- Volatile and Contracted are in that gap. > - should the bar be higher (i.e more difficult to justify) for > interfaces that teams want to be Private? We already push hard on teams to avoid Private (and even Volatile) in unwarranted cases. I don't know what else you want done or that could reasonably be done here. Nor do I think this line of discussion will lead to a fix for the GLDv3 problem. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
