On Sun, 8 Oct 2000, Russell King wrote:
>
> The only time that minix_new_inode sets *error is if it succeeds! The
> same applies to minix_mknod, minix_mkdir, and minix_symlink. With this
> fixed, the above oops no longer happens. Here is a patch to fix this.
> This makes minix follow the same "method" as ext2fs towards returning
> errors from *_new_inode:
Patch looks fine, and applied.
HOWEVER, it does show once again, that the way these errors are passed
around is just fundamentally broken. It would probably be better to follow
the _real_ rules for error handling, which are:
ALWAYS _RETURN_ THE ERROR.
Having return values passed by an argument pointer is broken. ALWAYS.
This, btw, is why Linux returns error numbers as -Exxx instead of using
"-1" and "errno" - I dislike the latter enormously.
This is also why the VFS layer tends to use ERR_PTR/PTR_ERR/IS_ERR: it
makes it very easy to pass back error information, and it makes it very
hard to do it wrong. I suspect both minix and ext2 would be better off
using that convention instead.
It's not worth changing at this point, but for future reference it would
probably be much preferable to return the error code instead of the
horrible "error value through pointer access" method, which is usually
rather inefficient too.
Linus
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Oct 15 2000 - 21:00:10 EST