Re: [dpdk-dev] [dpdk-techboard] DPDK ABI/API Stability

["Burakov, Anatoly" <anatoly.burakov@intel.com>]

On 08-Apr-19 10:04 AM, Ray Kinsella wrote:
> On 07/04/2019 10:48, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
>> 04/04/2019 16:07, Burakov, Anatoly:
>>> On 04-Apr-19 1:52 PM, Ray Kinsella wrote:
>>>> On 04/04/2019 11:54, Bruce Richardson wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, Apr 04, 2019 at 10:29:19AM +0100, Burakov, Anatoly wrote:
>>>>>> On 03-Apr-19 4:42 PM, Ray Kinsella wrote:
> [SNIP]
>>> So, if we are to cement our core API - we have to make a concrete effort
>>> to specify what goes and what stays, if we want it to be maintainable.
>>> The DPDK 1.0 specification, if you will :)
>>
>> "DPDK 1.0 specification", that's a great project name :-)
>>
> 
> Honestly - I would say that I am nervous of this.
> 
> The definition of a DPDK 1.0 specification as a gate to API stability,
> feels like a "great plan tomorrow" instead of a "good plan" today. I
> think that getting people to dedicate time to such a specification might
> prove problematic and I could see this effort being very time consuming.
> It might never get completed.
> 
> My preference would be to instead adopt a well-publicised community
> timeline for adopting more conservative API maintenance rules.
> 
> Perhaps we could give ourselves as a community a time-limited window in
> which to address concerns around the API before they become hardened -
> perhaps say until DPDK 19.11 LTS, or something of the order of 6 months
> to 9 months.
> 
> We then would know the timeline when niggles like exposure of internal
> structures and mbuf structure needed to be sorted by and could
> prioritize accordingly.
> 
> Ray K
> 

My worry here is that some API's get more attention than others, but 
requirements for freezing the API/ABI are applicable to all of them.

Everyone loves discussing specifics of mbufs and dev API's, and I have 
no doubt that DPDK community can arrive at a consensus with regards to 
mbuf format etc. in a timely manner, since everyone has a vested 
interest in those covering their use cases. I have way less confidence 
in us possibly having saner and more maintainable platform 
initialization code, simply because any attempt to change those will 
likely be met with "please keep all of the old stuff working", which 
gets us right back to where we started.

-- 
Thanks,
Anatoly