On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 12:20:59PM -0700, Bob Palowoda wrote: > > All the Private interfaces in ON are now open source. Just as you > > could see many of them before by looking at header files or running nm > > on libraries doesn't mean that they're any more usable now. > > Sorry I didn't know the pcic module wasn't in ON.
It is, actually, I misspoke. I probably should have said that all the Private interfaces in OpenSolaris are open-source (it looks like the pcic module hasn't been open-sourced yet; I don't know if it's scheduled to be). The statement is somewhat tautological, but what I'm getting at is that there's little "protecting" you from using a Private interface -- they're not hidden or obfuscated in the code in any way. In some cases, symbols are scoped locally to a library, but many Private symbols are available, because something outside the library, but elsewhere in ON needs it. There are plenty of other interfaces (executables, command-line flags, script libraries, etc.) that aren't protected in any way. That doesn't mean that you should feel free to use them -- because they are Private, they may change incompatibly at any time, and whatever you wrote that depends on them might break. If you want to be able to use such an interface, you'd need to either get a contract for that interface (so that you'd be told before the interface changed, that you could react to it gracefully) or you'd need to get the interface stability raised, which would require an ARC case. Hope that clears *something* up. :) Danek _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
