On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 03:23:36PM +0400, Evgeniy Polyakov wrote:

quoted

defines make some sense for userspace-visible ABIs because then people
can test for features with ifdef.  It doesn't make any sense for constants
that are used purely in-kernel.  For those enums make more sense because
you can for example looks at the symbolic names with a debugger.

Enums are only usefull when value is increased with each new member by
one.

No, they are not.  Please search the lkml archives, this came up multiple
times.

There will be either several syscalls or multiplexer...
I prefer to have one syscall and a lot of multiplexers inside.

To make life for everyone to detangle the mess hard.  Please at least
try to follow existing design principles.

quoted

quoted

I created a char device in first releases and was forced to not use it
at all.

Do you have a reference to it?  In this case a char devices makes a lot of
sense because you get a filedescriptor and have operations only defined on
it.  In fact given that you have a multiplexer anyway there's really no
point in adding a syscall for that aswell, you could rather use the existing
and debugged ioctl() multiplexer.  Sure, it's still not what we consider
nice, but better than adding even more odd multiplexer syscalls.

Somewhere in february.
Here is link to initial anounce which used ioctl and raw char device and
enums for all constants.

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-netdev&m=113949344414464&w=2

That thread only shows your patch but no comments to it.  Do you have
an url for the complaint about this design?  And please include the author
of it in the cc list of your reply so we can settle the arguments.