[dpdk-dev] [PATCH] drivers: make driver names consistent

[Thomas Monjalon]

2016-10-19 18:05, Yuanhan Liu:
> On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 06:46:40PM +0200, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
> > 2016-10-18 22:18, Yuanhan Liu:
> > > On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 03:42:54PM +0200, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
> > > > 2016-10-18 21:06, Yuanhan Liu:
> > > > > On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 02:50:16PM +0200, Jan Blunck wrote:
> > > > > > >From my understanding this is a massive API breakage. This forces all
> > > > > > existing users of the virtual PMDs to change with zero benefit. Even
> > > > > > if that isn't enough it also makes it impossible to switch between
> > > > > > releases by recompiling.
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > Can we please revert these changes and work on some aliasing support
> > > > > > for the PMDs to fix it long term?
> > > > > 
> > > > > +1. Aliasing is also something I would suggest before making such renames.
> > > > 
> > > > It is a brutal change, yes.
> > > > It was announced in 16.07 release notes though.
> > > 
> > > Yes, but it still took me a while (by running git bisect) to figure out
> > > what went wrong: I wasn't aware of such note, that I was thinking maybe
> > > something is broken.
> > > 
> > > Later I also got quite few same complains. It may also took them a while
> > > to know what's happened.
> > > 
> > > Anyway, my point is, for this kind of change, we should have added the
> > > alias support firstly.
> > 
> > Yes.
> > 
> > > If that's been done, then the announcement is not
> > > needed at all?
> > 
> > The announcement would be needed to remove the aliases, later.
>  
> Why do you have to remove an aliase? What's wrong if they stay there
> forever. I think the naming will be switched (maybe slowly) when we
> haved updated the doc (whereas it states "net_vhost" but not "eth_vhost"
> only).
> 
> After few releases, the name should have been switched fluently. And
> we should not care about those alias.

Yes
I was just thinking removing dead code later.
And it's generally simpler to end with only one way of doing things.