Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Fri, 9 Oct 1998 09:48:41 -0700 (PDT) | | From | Tim Smith <> | | Subject | Re: unremovable files and possible fs corruption (2.1.123) |
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On 8 Oct 1998, david parsons wrote: > Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@MIT.EDU> wrote: > >But now that glibc is around, it should be pretty easy to add this field > >to struct stat, and then add the chflags system call. > > And what will this do to code that's already built and shipping? > It seems like promiscuously adding records to a published structure > is a recipe for Bad Things.
It is for structures that are badly designed, like (unfortunately) many Unix structures. This is one thing Microsoft got right. Almost all system-defined structures start out with a field that the user fills in with the size of the structure before giving it to the system. If new fields have been added at the end that the program doesn't know about, the system simply doesn't fill them. As long as MS limits themselves to only adding new fields at the end and not changing the meaning of the old fields, they don't break old software.
--Tim Smith
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