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Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2016 14:48:43 -0700
From: Matthew Hall <mhall@mhcomputing.net>
To: Marc Sune <marcdevel@gmail.com>
Cc: Panu Matilainen <pmatilai@redhat.com>,
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Subject: Re: [dpdk-dev] DPDK namespace
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On Thu, Apr 07, 2016 at 12:16:34PM +0200, Marc Sune wrote:
> I keep not understanding the ABI policy, and particularly why ABI changes
> have to be announced once cycle before _if_ there is already at least one
> ABI change proposed. DPDK applications will have to recompile anyway.
> 
> This aspect of the policy only slows down DPDK development and it pollutes
> the repository with commits announcing ABI changes that are irrelevant
> after 2 cycles, as (code) diffs show that already (not mentioning NEXT_ABI
> complexity and extra LOCs).
> 
> Maintaining LTS releases, and enforcing bug fixing in old LTS first,
> upstreaming bugfixes is to me a much better approach to solve backwards
> compatibility issues.
> 
> But this is probably another discussion.

Yes, separate discussion. But I agree 100,000%. As a community member in my 
spare time I get tripped up by NEXT_ABI pollution just trying to submit 
trivial patches all the time, then I don't really have any good idea how to 
fix it, and I have to annoy Thomas with dumb questions across the time zones.

I would really prefer to dump all the drama about ABIs and make a maintenance 
only LTS release which only gets bug fixes people specifically need and not 
random fixes or features.

Matthew.