[dpdk-dev] Marking symbols as experimental in the headers only

[David Marchand]

On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 5:48 PM Neil Horman <nhorman at tuxdriver.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 03, 2018 at 02:01:02PM +0100, David Marchand wrote:
> > Hello Neil,
> >
> > Looking at
> >
> http://doc.dpdk.org/guides/contributing/versioning.html#experimental-apis,
> > is there a real need to mark both the definition and the declaration of a
> > symbol with the __rte_experimental marker ?
> >
> When I initially wrote the feature I marked both the function prototype
> and its
> definition with the macro to be consistent, as I like to make both
> declaration
> and definition look visually simmilar, just to ease readability, but I'm
> not
> bound to doing it that way per-se
>
> As to weather or not you can only mark the declaration as experimental,
> I'm not
> 100% sure.  I think thats an artifact of the compiler.  That is to say, the
> macro expands to a compiler attribute that is applied at compile time, and
> checked at link time, and I'm not sure what clang or gcc will do if there
> is a
> discrepancy between the attributes listed in the declaration and the
> definition.
>
> I would say, give it a try, and if you can demonstrate that adding the
> attribute
> only to the declaration results in a link-time warning when external code
> attempts to call an experimental function, I would have no problem
> handling it
> that way.
>

Did not experiment yet, putting this in my todolist.
Just, I can see that lib/librte_pipeline/ at least only marks the
declarations.


-- 
David Marchand