Re: statx(2) API and documentation

[Miklos Szeredi]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 12:22 AM, Florian Weimer <fw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> * Andreas Dilger:
>
>>> So what's the point exactly?
>>
>> Ah, I see your point...  STATX_ALL seems to be mostly useful for the kernel
>> to mask off flags that it doesn't currently understand.  It doesn't make
>> much sense for applications to specify STATX_ALL, since they don't have any
>> way to know what each flag means unless they are hard-coded to check each of
>> the STATX_* flags individually.  They should build up a mask of STATX_* flags
>> based on what they care about (e.g. "find" should only request attributes
>> based on the command-line options given).
>
> Could you remove it from the UAPI header?  I didn't want to put it
> into the glibc header, but was overruled.

To summarize Linus' rule of backward incompatibility: you can do it as
long as nobody notices.  So yeah, we could try removing STATX_ALL from
the uapi header, but we'd have to put it back in, once somebody
complains.

Thanks,
Miklos