On Thu, Feb 04, 2016 at 06:17:58PM +0100, Goffredo Baroncelli wrote: > On 2016-02-04 02:33, Qu Wenruo wrote: > > The idea itself makes a lot of sense. > > But I have at least two things to worry about: > > > > 1) Old scripts backward compatibility > > Especially xfstests. Maintainer will hate it a lot. > > As we have changed it several times and broken existing test cases. > > > > Although personally I like to let all the backward compatibility > > things go hell, but that's definitely not how things work. :( > > we could change the name of the btrfs prog (like bfs or bctl ?). > > If the command is called with the old name (btrfs) the old behavior is > maintained; with the new name the new output is show if the specific sub > command was updated; instead if the specific sub-command is not updated, the > old output is show. > > We could allow a window of 1-year of transition where the new command will be > in the alpha state where there is no any guarantee to be backward compatible, > hoping that this time would be sufficient to reshape the output of all > commands. > > For the old command no update or enhancement should be allowed (with the > exception of bugfix of course).
If that's going to happen, can I strongly request that all of the output selection options in btrfs sub list are dropped, and all of the possible use cases enumerated, evaluated, and understood, before producing a set of coherent and functional options that are actually useful. There's a load of different ways that the command can be called, and several of them aren't well supported. There's also different questions what can be asked of the tool, and it's hard to work out which switches to use for any given desired output (if it supports them at all). This _really_ needs fixing. (I'm more than happy to do that hard thinking and write up a detailed spec for it, BTW). Hugo. -- Hugo Mills | How do you become King? You stand in the marketplace hugo@... carfax.org.uk | and announce you're going to tax everyone. If you http://carfax.org.uk/ | get out alive, you're King. PGP: E2AB1DE4 | Harry Harrison
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