From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ben Dooks Subject: Re: GPIO: Fix probe() error return in gpio driver probes Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:29:36 +0000 Message-ID: <20081218222936.GI8032@fluff.org.uk> References: <20081212152426.745254309@fluff.org.uk> <20081215101616.GB12431@fluff.org.uk> <20081215112226.18f7fb29@hyperion.delvare> <200812181016.28184.david-b@pacbell.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <200812181016.28184.david-b-yBeKhBN/0LDR7s880joybQ@public.gmane.org> Sender: linux-i2c-owner-u79uwXL29TY76Z2rM5mHXA@public.gmane.org To: David Brownell Cc: Jean Delvare , Ben Dooks , linux-kernel-u79uwXL29TY76Z2rM5mHXA@public.gmane.org, linux-i2c-u79uwXL29TY76Z2rM5mHXA@public.gmane.org List-Id: linux-i2c@vger.kernel.org On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 10:16:27AM -0800, David Brownell wrote: > On Monday 15 December 2008, Jean Delvare wrote: > > > > > > > I was thinking that -EINVAL is almost the least informative > > > > > diagnostic code possible, since so many places return it > > > > > that it's usually hard to find out *which* invalid parameter > > > > > triggered ... > > > > > > > > > > Is there a less-overloaded code you could return? > > > > > > > > -EINVAL sounds right to me, all that's really missing is dev_dbg() > > > > messages in the drivers to log what the exact problem was. > > Fair enough, though it just papers over how ambiguous -EINVAL is. Unforunately there's not a lot of choice in errno.h for other options. > > > It might be more acceptable to be dev_err(), that way it will get > > > printed no matter what debug options have been selected. If so, a > > > seperate patch is probably in order to make the change. > > > > As far as I can see, such errors would be caused by development-time > > mistakes, so dev_dbg() seems appropriate. dev_err() would make the > > binaries larger for all end-users. > > Right, dev_dbg() is the way to go. I'd ack a version of this patch > which pairs these -EINVAL changes with dev_dbg() messages to make > these problems less painful to track down. dev_err() is much abused. Ok, I'll try and sort that out for you as soon as possible. -- Ben (ben-elnMNo+KYs3YtjvyW6yDsg@public.gmane.org, http://www.fluff.org/) 'a smiley only costs 4 bytes'