Re: deprecating struct permissions?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Andy Wingo <address@hidden> skribis:

> I would like to deprecate struct permissions.

+1!

[...]

> Finally, struct permissions rely on the struct layout symbol mechanism,
> which is an abomination of an interface.  Ideally I'd like to remove
> tail arrays, self fields, opaque fields, read-only fields, and the
> layout symbol in the future, instead replaced by a simple field count
> and bitfield of "raw" values (the "u" fields).  So for 2.2 we could have
> all of these features map to "pw" fields, and in 2.4 we could remove
> them entirely.  Or we could deprecate them in 2.0 already; dunno.
> Perhaps that is best.

Sounds like a plan.  (Tail arrays have been deprecated since 2.0.0 IIRC,
so we could as well remove them in 2.2.)

Another approach would be to keep current structs in parallel with the
new low-level structs, and deprecate them altogether, but that would
create a parallel and incompatible world of structs, so that’s probably
not desirable.

Thanks,
Ludo’.