[ovs-dev] [PATCH 0/9] RFC: rework code base for third-party linking

Ben Warren ben at skyportsystems.com
Fri Feb 26 23:16:07 UTC 2016


Hi Ben,
> On Feb 26, 2016, at 2:32 PM, Ben Pfaff <blp at ovn.org> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 03:46:50PM -0800, ben at skyportsystems.com wrote:
>> From: Ben Warren <ben at skyportsystems.com>
>> 
>> This patch set is a first stab at making a 'dev' distribution for OpenVswitch
>> The goal is to provide shared libraries and header files so that third party
>> applications can link in OVS rather than always using the command line
>> utilities.
>> 
>> Design:
>> 
>> Nothing too exotic here - some header files have been moved from 'lib' to
>> 'include/openvswitch'.  All header files in 'include' are considered
>> appropriate for third-party inclusion.
> 
> Looking at the patches, I'm a little confused.  I assumed that part of
> the goal here would be to make sure that include/openvswitch was
> self-contained, that is, headers in it only refer to other headers in it
> (or to system headers)[*].  A secondary goal is to expose useful
> functionality.  But the first patch that moves ofp-parse.h into
> include/openvswitch doesn't seem to do this.  It doesn't expose useful
> functionality, as far as I can tell, because there's basically nothing
> that any client can call without including lots of other headers not in
> include/openvswitch.  For example, I can't use parse_ofp_str(), because
> that needs struct ofputil_flow_mod from lib/ofp-util.h.  I guess it's
> self-contained in a technical way (since it does delete the unneeded
> #include of lib/packets.h, which at first I expected to make it
> not-self-contained).
> 
> Can you help me understand better?
> 
Yes, our goals match 100%.  I probably got ahead of myself by posting this patch set.  I have since added another 15 patches that get us to the point where ‘opf-util.h’ is moved to the public include directory.  Should I post the V2 patch set, or do you want to comment on this one?
> Thanks,
> 
> Ben.
> 
> [*] There was one minor violation of this rule.  I sent out a fix:
>        http://openvswitch.org/pipermail/dev/2016-February/066869.html <http://openvswitch.org/pipermail/dev/2016-February/066869.html>

regard,
Ben W.




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