In the 5.0 release, we ran into occasional issues where generic FCV constants were used instead of real FCVs. For these cases, we should investigate any improvements to help engineers from accidentally stumbling into this error. We currently require any generic FCV usage to have a corresponding comment that begins with “(Generic FCV reference):”. One suggestion is to expand that comment to start with:

(Generic FCV reference): This FCV reference must remain across binary version releases because…

So that it is clear that this reference must persist across releases and that engineers must explain why the reference should persist across releases

We could also consider renaming “generic” terminology to be more representative of their use cases, something to represent that these FCVs (kLatest, kLastLTS, etc) will change with each new release (i.e. in the 6.1 release kLatest points to kVersion_6_1 and kLastLTS points to kVersion_6_0, but in the 7.1 release kLatest points to kVersion_7_1 and kLastLTS points to kVersion_7_0)