Re: git: 32137c41065c - main - sound: Retire the version constants

On 10/3/26 11:48, Jason Harmening wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 1, 2026 at 4:08 PM John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> 
> 
>> Hmm, I guess the trick is what counts as gratuitous which is fairly
>> subjective.  The policy I've tried to follow when refactoring APIs used
>>
> 
> I don't think it's quite so subjective.  If a breaking change doesn't have
> a clear benefit (e.g., improved functionality/ease of debugging, reduced
> maintenance burden, even renaming an offensively-named symbol), then
> there's a clear cost but no clear benefit, therefore it's gratuitous.
> Whether the breakage can be dealt with easily enough using #if[n]def isn't
> really the point.

The other possible factor to consider in your list of benefits is that
removing old/deprecated "ways of doing things" for code hygiene purposes
avoids future developers copying from the "old" way instead of the "new" way.

For this particular change of removing these constants I do find it a bit
borderline.  If someone does actually refactor the macros at some point to
largely remove the versions then I think that would be a more compelling
reason to remove these particular macros.

-- 
John Baldwin