From: Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@ens-lyon.org>
To: "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@crashcourse.ca>
Cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: what's the purpose of MAXHOSTNAMELEN?
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:28:27 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20091229192827.GF4815@const> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.2.00.0912291416230.4967@localhost>
Robert P. J. Day, le Tue 29 Dec 2009 14:19:30 -0500, a écrit :
> so lots of people define it but no one uses it. it *is* exported to
> user space in /usr/include/asm/param.h, but i still have no idea what
> it's for in user space. obsolete?
It's like all these *MAX* #defines: they are a bad way to express the
system limitations. They are bad because they end up compiled-in, but
also because people understand them as "a typical allocation length" and
get lazy. The typical example is PATH_MAX, which is #defined to 4096.
A _lot_ of applications thus keep allocating 4KB for all paths.
See
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/porting/guidelines.html#PATH_MAX_tt_MAX_PATH_tt_MAXPATHL
If you could drop it (would be completely POSIX-compliant), that'd be a
great service to GNU/Hurd porters, but I bet you'll also get a lot of
angry people.
Samuel
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2009-12-29 19:35 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2009-12-29 19:19 what's the purpose of MAXHOSTNAMELEN? Robert P. J. Day
2009-12-29 19:28 ` Samuel Thibault [this message]
2009-12-29 19:40 ` Jeff Garzik
2009-12-29 19:56 ` Samuel Thibault
2009-12-29 20:20 ` Jeff Garzik
2009-12-29 20:26 ` Samuel Thibault
2009-12-29 21:00 ` Vikram Dhillon
2009-12-29 20:13 ` Robert P. J. Day
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