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OpenSHMEM Application Programming Interface
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Remove start_pes section #404

Open jamesaross opened 4 years ago

jamesaross commented 4 years ago

The start_pes routine is deprecated since 1.2, but not removed. Using the same logic to remove the cache management section, should remove the start_pes section? The document doesn't have sections on related deprecated routines _my_pe, _num_pes. Rather, they have notes in their replacement routines shmem_my_pe and shmem_n_pes, respectively. Similarly, there is already a note in the shmem_init section about start_pes being deprecated.

naveen-rn commented 4 years ago

Related item: I think, as a community we should start deciding on the versioning schemes. We don't have backward compatibility on the planned release with the existing 1.4 release. We have removed support for FTN, cache, and then this request to remove start_pes. We release 1.5 as an update to 1.4, but in fact we have removed compatibility.

jamesaross commented 4 years ago

@naveen-rn, Hasn't Fortran been the only thing removed from 1.5? I think it has been the only thing removed since 1.0. The cache management routines and start_pes are deprecated, not removed. I only proposed to remove the start_pes section text within the specification, not remove it from backward compatibility support. If you look at the shmem_init section, it details how start_pes has been deprecated. It's been deprecated for a while and as @nspark mentions in #378, we've purged other deprecated API sections from the specification document. But software support remains.

naveen-rn commented 4 years ago

@jamesaross are you saying that implementations might still need to support cache management routines in OpenSHMEM-1.5? I'm confused with how it is represented in https://github.com/BryantLam/openshmem-specification/pull/9/files

jamesaross commented 4 years ago

I missed that. Obviously, a little clarity is needed. I don't recall voting on removing the cache API. I didn't know removal could be done by a section committee. I thought #378 was for removing the deprecated section text.

jdinan commented 4 years ago

@jamesaross I agree -- in general, removal should not be something we handle through section committee. At the face-to-face, we decided to make an exception and garbage collect the cache APIs since they have not been used in 20 years.

Edit: @BryantLam's section edits only remove Fortran APIs and C cache APIs. Sorry if my earlier post caused any confusion.

jamesaross commented 4 years ago

Personally, I have no concerns about removing the cache management API.

Somehow, I don't recall that discussion at the F2F meeting. It wasn't included in 1.5rc1 and it wasn't mentioned at the March 20 committee meeting. Unless you interpret the pull request #378 discussion correctly or parse unmerged LaTeX diffs on an external fork where a single line notes removal, it's like backward compatibility for the C API was broken without most of the community being aware. Let's make this very clear at the next meeting.