On Thu, Feb 4, 2016 at 10:17 AM, Goffredo Baroncelli <kreij...@inwind.it> 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 ?).
btrfsctl? :-) Is there a big problem with just having a consistent "machine readable" flag for the existing btrfs that achieves this goal? Why fix bugs in two different places when this is really just a request to have consistent output *formatting*? > 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. If there's a new command, then it ought to be for scripts, not for users. We are much better off breaking all scripts with a new way of doing things going forward, than breaking users (again) with another command change. > > 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. > Well quite honestly I think bash scripts depending on user space tools are subject to no guarantees anyway. How about an actual stable API/ABI for developers to depend on if they need to interact with Btrfs, rather than doing it indirectly through user space tools, which are mainly for users after all. -- Chris Murphy -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
