[dpdk-dev] DPDK namespace

[Marc Sune]

2016-04-07 11:33 GMT+02:00 Panu Matilainen <pmatilai at redhat.com>:

> On 04/07/2016 12:18 PM, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
>
>> Thank you everyone for the feedbacks.
>>
>> 2016-04-05 15:56, Thomas Monjalon:
>>
>>> The goal of this email is to get some feedback on how important it is
>>> to fix the DPDK namespace.
>>>
>>
>> Everybody agree every symbols must be prefixed. Checking and fixing the
>> namespace consistency will be in the roadmap.
>>
>> It seems most of you agree renaming would be a nice improvement but not
>> so important.
>> The main drawback is the induced backporting pain, even if we have
>> some scripts to convert the patches to the old namespace.
>> Note: the backports can be in DPDK itself or in the applications.
>>
>> If there is enough agreement that we should do something, I suggest to
>>> introduce the "dpdk_" prefix slowly and live with both "rte_" and "dpdk_"
>>> during some time.
>>> We could start using the new prefix for the new APIs (example: crypto)
>>> or when there is a significant API break (example: mempool).
>>>
>>
>> The slow change has been clearly rejected in favor of a complete change
>> in one patch.
>> The timing was also discussed as it could impact the pending patches.
>> So it would be done at the end or the beginning of a release.
>> Marc suggests to do it for 16.04 as the numbering scheme has changed.
>>
>
> Just noting that it cannot be done in 16.04 because the ABI policy
> requires a deprecation cycle of at least one major release for every
> breakage. And we're discussing a total 100% breakage of everything here,
> even if its just a simple rename.


I keep not understanding the ABI policy, and particularly why ABI changes
have to be announced once cycle before _if_ there is already at least one
ABI change proposed. DPDK applications will have to recompile anyway.

This aspect of the policy only slows down DPDK development and it pollutes
the repository with commits announcing ABI changes that are irrelevant
after 2 cycles, as (code) diffs show that already (not mentioning NEXT_ABI
complexity and extra LOCs).

Maintaining LTS releases, and enforcing bug fixing in old LTS first,
upstreaming bugfixes is to me a much better approach to solve backwards
compatibility issues.

But this is probably another discussion.

Marc


>
>         - Panu -
>
>
> There is no strong conclusion at this point because we need to decide
>> wether the renaming deserves to be done or never.
>> I suggest to take the inputs from the technical board.
>>
>> Do not hesitate to comment. Thanks
>>
>>
>