On Friday, 3 February 2023 09:29:50 CET Jiri Pirko wrote: [...]
Why kernel version is not enough for you? My point is, why to maintain internal driver version alongside with the kernel version?
[...]
Also note that we can't do a simple kernel version to year notation mapping in userspace in batctl. OpenWrt uses the most recent Linux LTS release. But might feature a backport of a more recent batman-adv which is newer than the one this stable kernel would provide. Or people also often use Debian stable but compile and use the latest batman-adv version with it.
Yeah, for out of tree driver, have whatever.
A while back, my personal opinion changed after there were various Linux developers/maintainers were trying to either remove it or wondering about this bump. The idea which I've proposed was to:
* still ship the "backports" like out-of-tree tarball with a module version - but directly in its "compat" code * continue to use in projects (which for whatever reason cannot use the in- kernel implementation) a version which represents their upstream backports tarball + their (patch) revision: Something like "2022.0-openwrt-7" * for the in-kernel module, just return either
- remove the version information completely from the kernel module MODULE_VERSION + drop BATADV_ATTR_VERSION + modifying batctl to fetch that from uname(). But of course, that would break old batctl versions [1] - or by setting BATADV_SOURCE_VERSION to UTS_RELEASE (+suffix?) or UTS_VERSION
But this wasn't well received when mentioning it to Simon+Linus (but I could misremember the persons involved here).
Kind regards, Sven
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/r/20201205085604.1e3fcaee@kicinski-fedora-pc1c0hjn.D...