> > Perhaps you've got lots of patches were people are using internal APIs they
Exactly. Or rather it is not defined on the module level. We got
"static" of course, but I think we should have a similar mechanism
on a module level.
It would not be fully supported either -- can still change etc. --
but there is a reasonable expectation that those external
APIs will change less often than internal interfaces.
That is EXPORT_SYMBOL already. The trouble is just that it covers
too much. My patchkit is trying to limit it again for a specific
use case -- exporting an "internal" interface to another module.
Or rather a set of modules.
Standard example is TCP: TCP exports nearly everything and the
single user is the TCP code in ipv6.ko. Instead those symbols should
be limited to be only accessable to ipv6.ko.
The reason I went with the more generic namespace mechanism
instead of EXPORT_SYMBOL_TO() is that ipv6 is ever split up
it would still work.
Also using namespaces doesn't have any more overhead than
EXPORT_SYMBOL_TO() and the complexity is about the same
(not very much anyways -- just look at the patches)
That is another reason.
-ANdi
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