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Should the Lustre preparation patches go in?Should the Lustre preparation patches go in?Posted Jun 11, 2004 16:54 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)Parent article: Should the Lustre preparation patches go in? It seems to me that the preparation patches shouldn't go in until a user of them is at least proposed for inclusion. In evaluating an interface, it is often important to see exactly how it is intended to be used; it can turn out that an API looks fine until you look at the code which uses it, at which point it becomes clear that the code that uses it has to work around annoying aspects of the API. It shouldn't be necessary for Lustre to actually get included (or NFS et al to get modified to use these hooks) in order to get the preparation patches in, but I think that at least the portions that use the new APIs should be critiqued.
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Should the Lustre preparation patches go in? Posted Jun 11, 2004 18:00 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] it can turn out that an API looks fine until you look at the code which uses it, at which point it becomes clear that the code that uses it has to work around annoying aspects of the API.Remember that the Lustre people are already using these interfaces, and have plenty of experience with them. It couldn't be any more clear to someone else if they are working around annoying aspects of the API they designed. So really the only evaluation to be done in this area is whether the API is good for some hypothetical future user. And considering the hypothetical future user is exactly contrary to the mindset that says leave out the Lustre APIs because Lustre isn't in-tree now. A good interface stands on its own. An interface designed for a particular present user, or many particular users, is usually pretty bad. The "don't have interfaces for out-of-tree modules" philosophy has nothing to do with making good interfaces. It has to do with having the flexibility to change the interfaces later. If you can't modify all the users of an interface, then you're either stuck with never changing it, or you regularly break things. Linux developers have always abhorred the leave it alone -- you might break something philosophy, so interfaces for out-of-tree modules are anathema to their development style.
Should the Lustre preparation patches go in? Posted Jun 12, 2004 0:16 UTC (Sat) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] The issue is that the API could be usable, but only if you do somethingthat the core developers wouldn't accept. You're right that they wouldn't have made it awkward to use, but it might be impossible to close some race, or only work in a module, or something like that. Just looking at the interface won't necessarily tell you if it is fundamentally flawed in some way as to cause bugs in the user code rather than in the implementation.
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