svn commit: r255219 - in head: contrib/tcpdump lib/libc lib/libc/capability lib/libc/include lib/libc/sys lib/libprocstat sbin/dhclient sbin/hastd sys/amd64/linux32 sys/bsm sys/cddl/compat/opensola...

[John-Mark Gurney]

Konstantin Belousov wrote this message on Thu, Jan 02, 2014 at 15:13 +0200:
> > > Afaik you could just remove the "spare" and steal 2 or 4 entries from 
> > > _kf_ispare until it is sorted.
> > 
> > Yes, this would work for current cap_rights_t structure, at least for
> > i386 and amd64, but would only allow to expand the structure by one
> > uint64_t in the future (which might or might not be enough). The
> > cap_rights_t structure is designed to be expanded to 5 uint64_ts without
> > breaking ABI. I don't want to stuck with current cap_rights_t that is
> > designed to expand, but cannot be, because kinfo_file wasn't modified at
> > the start of a major branch.
> The ABI stability is not limited to the single branch.  It must be
> preserved across whole project lifetime.

Umm. when did this policy change happen?  I thought ABI compatibility
was limited to major releases of FreeBSD?  How are you suppose to do
any work if you can't break ABI ever?

I did a quick search for "freebsd policy abi breakage" and found some
mailing list posts about this, but no authoritative statement...

Of course the problem is that when we move to
(ASN.1/libnv/ctf/YAML/JSON/XML/etc) we will break ABI compatibility too,
or introduce tons of compatibility code that will rot...

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."