Re: [PATCH] Do not segfault because of kernel version

[Jim Rees <rees@umich.edu>]

Luk Claes wrote:

  > You can't return -1 from a function returning unsigned int.  I think you
  > want to return something like
  > 
  > MAKE_VERSION(9999, 255, 255)
  
  Would it not be better to return UINT_MAX in that case to avoid having
  to change it when version 10000 would be released and to avoid overflows
  that could potentially order lower?

Maybe.  I wanted the second and third numbers to be the max possible (255).
But of course they will be anyway if you return UINT_MAX and are running on
an architecture that represents ints in two's complement binary.  Which is
the case today, but wasn't there a port of unix to the System 36 at one
time?  Ok, that's just silly.

Yes, just return UINT_MAX.  Fix the other error return too, the one where
uname fails.  And put in a comment if you can briefly summarize Linus's
argument.