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...

[Stanislav Sedov]

On Jan 2, 2014, at 1:27 PM, Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> I personally don't consider it so awful and critical as you do, clearly,
> but I do recognize it as a problem. I'm happy to consume spares, which
> should fix compatibility with older releases at the cost of breaking
> compatibility with 10-RCs.  At least for i386 and amd64, not sure how
> using ints for uint64_t will work for other arches.

Personally, I’d prefer if we use spare fields for now.  That will allow
us to maintain ABI stability for the current release, and have enough time
to implement the new, incompatible, interface in addition to the old one
in HEAD.  The interface is used a lot by 3rd party applications to obtain
the information about open file descriptors (in place of the Linux’ /proc
interface), and this change will leave 9.x and before binaries broken in
a subtle way on 10.x and beyond.  Most of the commercial applications are
shipped compiled against 9.x or even 8.x and 7.x, and although the extent
of the damage is unknown, it might turn out to be a problem.  To me, it
seems that breaking the ABI with 10.x RC is less dangerous.

--
ST4096-RIPE