Re: [PATCH v2 0/2] Validating UAPI backwards compatibility

From: Trilok Soni
Date: Fri Mar 10 2023 - 13:22:00 EST


On 3/10/2023 12:09 AM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
On Tue, Feb 28, 2023 at 11:54:00PM -0800, John Moon wrote:
Our goal is to add tooling for vendor driver developers because the
upstream model of expert maintainer code review can be difficult to
replicate in-house. Tools may help developers catch simple UAPI
incompatibilities that could be easily overlooked by in-house review.

Why would this matter in any way for the kernel? If you tool is useful
for in-kernel usage it should be added to the tree and documented as
such, but ouf of tree crap simply does not matter.

This tool will be helpful for the kernel maintainers and reviewers as well if it can detect potential UAPI backward compatibilities. Even for the developers while changing UAPI interfaces at kernel.org before submission.

John is trying to highlight also that this tool can be useful for downstream users who want to keep the UAPI backward compatibility like we do at upstream. We can remove the above text, since we would like to mainline it at kernel.org.

---Trilok Soni