[arc-discuss] Re: ARB rabbit holes (was: Requesting PSARC/2007/124 details)

[Bill Sommerfeld]

On Wed, 2007-03-28 at 16:37 -0400, Dale Ghent wrote:
>    3) (Paraphrasing yourself) "ARC documents are not documentation"

that's an incorrect paraphrase.

ARC documents most certainly are documentation but they do not
automatically create a commitment that an interface will not change
again in the future.  you need to carefully review the interface
taxonomy for that.

see: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/on/devref_toc/devref_7/

Binary compatibility is extremely important to us.

to date the folks responsible for maintaining the VFS layer have not
(despite periodic prodding from PSARC!) signed up to commit to do the
work to keep it 100% binary compatible, in a way which permits the
interface to evolve to add new features.

> 
> The second edition of Solaris Internals does a fine job at  
> documenting VFS/vnode. Call that public documentation for lack of a  
> better word. Obviously, it is now out of date as of 2007/124 putback.  
> Bummer.

it's public, but not Public in the sense of the interface taxonomy.

And note that Private in the interface taxonomy does not mean Secret. 

for instance a module interface for something like Apache where you
effectively need to build all the modules from the same source tree may
well be well known and public, but in terms of stability, it's probably
best thought of as Consolidation Private or even Project Private.