On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 10:42:08AM -0700, Jason Gunthorpe wrote: >We are well past the point of doing experimental breaking stuff in the core >uapi libraries. If it is in the master git it should be shippable by a distro, >and it is so easy >to slap a version number on the HEAD if a distro/ofed/etc >wants one.
This may be true, but since it is the master, there could be all kinds of new stuff in it and not just the simple bug fix a H/W vendor might want to put into his/her user-space H/W specific library. Consider the situation when some H/W vendor just wants to provide a simple fix to their library. In the current model, they simply fix it and release a new H/W specific library that a customer or distro can pick up and ship. In the merged library case, the fix has to go into master, which may have other new stuff already in it. If you simply build a new package and roll the version number, it now has to be retested and revalidated by the distro and perhaps other ISVs that have coded and validated with the previous package, since it has new stuff and not just a bug fix. Further, that new stuff might even require new kernel code, so it could not just be replaced as a new user-space package by a distro w/o updating the kernel. There are definitely pros and cons to each model. Since I am not a maintainer of any of the code, I really don't have a strong opinion either way. I think it is really up to all the various H/W vendors and maintainers of the other libraries, umad, rdmacm, ibcm, etc. and the Linux distros which way they would prefer it be done. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-rdma" in the body of a message to [email protected] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
