[Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINER TOPIC] ABI feature gates?

[Greg KH]

On Fri, Aug 04, 2017 at 10:53:01AM +0200, Hannes Reinecke wrote:
> On 08/04/2017 10:42 AM, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> > On Thu, 3 Aug 2017, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > 
> >> One way that we could try to make things better is by having some kind
> >> of semi-automated system which monitors changes in include/uapi/*.h in
> >> linux-next.  
> > 
> > It's unfortunately just uapi though, and for sysfs it's a bit more 
> > difficult to define a pathname pattern to watch for.
> > 
> Yeah; that has been my main headache with the kABI stuff.
> Nowadays sysfs is considered part of the kABI, but we have no way of
> tracking it; we basically rely on people filling out some off-side
> documentation, and hope they're not missing anything.
> And we don't mess up when generating patches :-)

We could start searching linux-next for new additions of sysfs files
(search for the ATTR macros), and complain that there are no matching
Documentation/ABI/ updates at the same time.  I try to do that when
reviewing patches that come through my trees, but yes, this is hard to
keep up to date with.

Sounds like a good GSoC project though, setting up the infrastructure to
do this in a semi-automated fashion.

greg k-h