Re: [PATCH] sys_waitid: return -EFAULT for NULL

Linus Torvalds
2009-01-14T00:33:01Z

On Tue, 13 Jan 2009, Roland McGrath wrote:
>
> It's always been invalid to call waitid() with a NULL pointer. It was an
> oversight that it was allowed (and acts like a wait4() call instead).

I'm not going to take this.

If it was some new system call, of if there was some downside to out
behavior, I might be interested. As it is, our behaviour has zero
downside, and changing existing interfaces simply isn't worth it.

The alleged "downsides" are bogus:

- POSIX is not that strict. EFAULT is one of the odd error cases anyway,
and even explicit requirements are irrelevant: if somebody wants to get
strict conformance paperwork done, you just need to tell where you
differ, and you're basically done. But perhaps more important, nobody
cares.

- The "portability" argument is totally bogus, since it's not like you
compile programs without even testing to another UNIX _anyway_.

So I'm simply not going to potentially break binaries over something that
is so _totally_ irrelevant. Document it in the man-page instead.

Linus