Re: [PATCH RESEND 0/7] Introduce MEDIA_VERSION to end KENREL_VERSION abuse in media

On Thu, 29 Jun 2017 11:42:59 +0200
Johannes Thumshirn [off-list ref] wrote:

On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 05:15:07PM -0300, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:

quoted

Sorry, but I can't see any advantage on it. On the downside, it
includes the media controller header file (media.h) where it
is not needed.  

My reasoning was the differences in semantics. KERNEL_VERSION() is for
encoding the kernel's version triplet not a API or Hardware or whatever
version. Other subsystems do this as well, for instance in NVMe we have the
NVME_VS() macro which is used to encode the NVMe Spec compliance from a human
readable form to the hardware's u32. Also KERNEL_VERISON() shouldn't have
in-tree users IMHO. Yes there is _one_ other user of it in-tree which is EXT4
and I already talked to Jan Kara about it and we decided to leave it in until
4.20.

Byte,
	Johannes

If you read Linus's comments on version.
Driver version is meaningless and there is a desire to rip it out of all
drivers. The reason is that drivers must always behave the same, i.e you
can't use version to change API/ABI behavior. 

Any upstream driver should never use KERNEL_VERSION().