On Sun, Apr 30, 2000 at 10:09:45PM -0700, Hans Reiser wrote:
> I think that improving support from folks who change VFS code for folks who
> are affected is needed.
It's not just VFS that has this issue. It is a general philosophy
that kernelspace APIs can change in unstable versions; drivers in the tree get
fixed-up by the person making the change, but externally maintained
drivers can only be updated by their maintainers. In an ideal world there would
be "formal" documentation of the changes, but it doesn't happen. Mailing list
archives are pretty useful though, and linux-fsdevel has low enough traffic
that searching the archives for changes isn't too difficult.
> I don't much care for the screaming at people who don't track your changes by
^^^^
??
> reading ext2 code updates
> development model that is currently in place. (E.g. the amiga FS emails seen
> on this list)
I agree that "screaming" as such probably isn't useful, but OTOH you can't
develop any code module and expect to be able to "close it off" - the world
changes :) Also, it works both ways -- if filesystem authors don't read the
mailing list, they can't influence the changes in a way which suits them.
> Perhaps a set of comments in the VFS code saying here is what you do to
> interface with me would be better.
Alan Cox and others have come up with a "kernel-doc" system for
commenting API functions, and some of the VFS source files are already using
this (fs/inode.c and fs/dcache.c, for example). This isn't the ultimate
solution - we need structure documentation and "overview" documentation too,
but with a standard format and location for such documentation, people might
be more inclined to write it :-)
[..]
> VFS code needs to be maintained by persons with supportive personalities.
I don't think the lack of documentation is anything to do with the maintainers'
personalities, it's more likely to be due to lack of time. I'm sure you would
have no difficulty getting a patch to add Documentation/DocBook/vfs.tmpl into
the kernel :-)
In the meantime, it might be worth collecting the various announcements that
have been posted to linux-fsdevel about 2.3 VFS changes, and adding them to
the Documentation directory..
