On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 12:22 AM, Florian Weimer <f...@deneb.enyo.de> wrote: > * Andreas Dilger: > >>> So what's the point exactly? >> >> Ah, I see your point... STATX_ALL seems to be mostly useful for the kernel >> to mask off flags that it doesn't currently understand. It doesn't make >> much sense for applications to specify STATX_ALL, since they don't have any >> way to know what each flag means unless they are hard-coded to check each of >> the STATX_* flags individually. They should build up a mask of STATX_* flags >> based on what they care about (e.g. "find" should only request attributes >> based on the command-line options given). > > Could you remove it from the UAPI header? I didn't want to put it > into the glibc header, but was overruled.
To summarize Linus' rule of backward incompatibility: you can do it as long as nobody notices. So yeah, we could try removing STATX_ALL from the uapi header, but we'd have to put it back in, once somebody complains. Thanks, Miklos
