Re: [dpdk-stable] [PATCH] meter: move RFC4115 trTCM APIs as none experimental

[Ray Kinsella <mdr@ashroe.eu>]

On 16/01/2020 12:42, Ferruh Yigit wrote:
> On 1/16/2020 11:54 AM, Neil Horman wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 12:25:06PM +0100, David Marchand wrote:
>>> On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 2:08 PM Eelco Chaudron <echaudro@redhat.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Moved RFC4115 APIs to none experimental as they have been there
>>>> since 19.02. Also, these APIs are the same as the none RFC4115 APIs.
>>>>
>>>> Signed-off-by: Eelco Chaudron <echaudro@redhat.com>
>>>
>>> There is a discussion on the OVS ml at the moment to get these symbols
>>> in the stable ABI for 19.11.
>>> I want to understand how this would be done.
>>>
>>> - I take this patch in 20.02, these symbols are added in the 20.0.1 ABI.
>>> On the other hand, the 19.11 release maintains the 20.0 ABI.
>>>
>>> Does it mean the backport adds these symbols with the 20.0 version in
>>> the 19.11 branch?
>>> Or is 20.0.1 version acceptable / a thing we want?
>>>
>>>
>>> - These symbol already existed in the 20.0 ABI, versioned as EXPERIMENTAL.
>>> We can go and remove these entries since we are not bound to preserve
>>> the experimental APIs.
>>> But, on the other hand, nothing should prevent us from keeping some
>>> aliases so that the symbols versioned EXPERIMENTAL are still available
>>> to existing users.
>>>
>> I would say that choice is up to you.  If you want to alias them to be nice to
>> prior users, thats fine by me. But experimental means experimental, and so users
>> have to be prepared to rebuild when things change, even if that change is
>> changing the version from experimental to a concrete version.
>>
> 
> I would prefer to keep the alias and don't break the existing users, specially
> for the case experimental API is becoming mature without change.
> 

Apologies for dragging up an older thread.
I had a thought later that we should add something formal to the ABI Policy.

Such that if we have an API that has been part of DPDK as experimental for a long time, 
to the point it has a number of users - out of kindness, the maintainer may ask a
contributor to add an alias until the next major ABI version is declared?
So as not to break consuming projects - make sense?

Thanks, 

Ray K