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Date:      Wed, 17 Nov 1999 03:20:25 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
To:        cracauer@cons.org (Martin Cracauer)
Cc:        marcel@scc.nl, cracauer@cons.org, bde@zeta.org.au, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/sys/i386/include signal.h
Message-ID:  <199911170320.UAA07079@usr08.primenet.com>
In-Reply-To: <19991115115552.A27870@cons.org> from "Martin Cracauer" at Nov 15, 99 11:55:52 am

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> I moved this to -arch, since we have to make some long-term decisions
> here:
> 
> 1) Does FreeBSD prefer to pass information like this as unnamed array
>    of bytes or as structs with proper fields?


As an observer...

I think any time there is a contract between the kernel and
user space about the layout of a field, it's evil.  There are
a lot of data interfaces that exist which are very, very bad
for the stability of software over upgrades (e.g. "ps",
"netstat", et. al.).

That said, I think "signal" is an exception in this case, so
if there is going to be a data interface for signal, and you
are going to reorganize it, at least put a version number
field in so that you can do backward compatability the right
way (or "at all", for that matter).


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.




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