On Fri, 28 Aug 1998, Richard Gooch wrote:
> David S. Miller writes:
> > Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 07:25:34 +1000
> > From: Richard Gooch <rgooch@atnf.csiro.au>
> >
> > Definately not! But if flush() was appended to the structure, then
> > people had only to recompile their drivers and all would be fine. So
> > there would be no silent failures in that scheme.
> >
> > ...
> >
> > So please explain where the benefit of placing flush() in the middle
> > is?
> >
> > So that people don't "only recompile their drivers" and the driver
> > code actually get updated and fixes done by or sent to the maintainer!
>
> Sigh. Maybe people don't understand my question. Let me ask it another
> way: did you want people to go in and manually insert NULL for the new
> flush() method and then go and recompile? If so, how is that better
> then automatic structure initialisation to NULL?
>
> If not: what did you want people to do? Write a flush() method? In
> that case, where was the announcement of the need for every driver to
> now implement a mandatory flush() method?
I have seen similar cases where the do-ops code deliberately had null
entries at the end so that new methods could be added without requiring
recompilation. That scheme also had a "version" number which each method
could check, thereby allowing a driver to support multiple levels of the
driver system.
john alvord
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