[dpdk-dev] [dpdk-techboard] DPDK ABI/API Stability

[Ray Kinsella]

On 07/04/2019 10:48, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
> 04/04/2019 16:07, Burakov, Anatoly:
>> On 04-Apr-19 1:52 PM, Ray Kinsella wrote:
>>> On 04/04/2019 11:54, Bruce Richardson wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Apr 04, 2019 at 10:29:19AM +0100, Burakov, Anatoly wrote:
>>>>> On 03-Apr-19 4:42 PM, Ray Kinsella wrote:
[SNIP]
>> So, if we are to cement our core API - we have to make a concrete effort 
>> to specify what goes and what stays, if we want it to be maintainable. 
>> The DPDK 1.0 specification, if you will :)
> 
> "DPDK 1.0 specification", that's a great project name :-)
> 

Honestly - I would say that I am nervous of this.

The definition of a DPDK 1.0 specification as a gate to API stability,
feels like a "great plan tomorrow" instead of a "good plan" today. I
think that getting people to dedicate time to such a specification might
prove problematic and I could see this effort being very time consuming.
It might never get completed.

My preference would be to instead adopt a well-publicised community
timeline for adopting more conservative API maintenance rules.

Perhaps we could give ourselves as a community a time-limited window in
which to address concerns around the API before they become hardened -
perhaps say until DPDK 19.11 LTS, or something of the order of 6 months
to 9 months.

We then would know the timeline when niggles like exposure of internal
structures and mbuf structure needed to be sorted by and could
prioritize accordingly.

Ray K