Re: statx(2) API and documentation

* Miklos Szeredi:

On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 12:22 AM, Florian Weimer [off-list ref] wrote:

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* Andreas Dilger:

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So what's the point exactly?

Ah, I see your point...  STATX_ALL seems to be mostly useful for the kernel
to mask off flags that it doesn't currently understand.  It doesn't make
much sense for applications to specify STATX_ALL, since they don't have any
way to know what each flag means unless they are hard-coded to check each of
the STATX_* flags individually.  They should build up a mask of STATX_* flags
based on what they care about (e.g. "find" should only request attributes
based on the command-line options given).

Could you remove it from the UAPI header?  I didn't want to put it
into the glibc header, but was overruled.

To summarize Linus' rule of backward incompatibility: you can do it as
long as nobody notices.  So yeah, we could try removing STATX_ALL from
the uapi header, but we'd have to put it back in, once somebody
complains.

I don't recall a rule about backwards-incompatible API changes.  This
wouldn't impact ABI at all.