Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC] [1/9] Core module symbol namespaces code and intro.

From: Arnd Bergmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:21:58 +0100

On Thursday 29 November 2007, Andi Kleen wrote:
> > I think it would be good if you could specify a default namespace
> > per module, that could reduce the amount of necessary changes significantly.
> 
> But also give less documentation. It's also not that difficult to mark
> the exports once. I've forward ported such patches over a few kernels
> and didn't run into significant me

Part of your sentence seems to be missing, but I guess I understand your
point. How many files did you annotate this way? I can see it as being
useful to have the namespace explicit in each symbol, but doing it once
per module sounds like the 80% solution for 20% of the work, and the
two don't even conflict. In the current kernel, I count 12644 exported
symbols in 1646 files, in 540 directories.

One problem I can see with annotating every symbol is that it conflicts
with other patches that add more exported functions to a file without
adding the namespace, or that simply break because of context changes.

	Arnd <><