Re: [PATCH 1/3] mm/sparse: Clean up the obsolete code comment

Michal Hocko
2019-03-21T10:35:25Z

On Thu 21-03-19 04:24:35, William Kucharski wrote:
>
>
> > On Mar 21, 2019, at 3:21 AM, Baoquan He <bhe@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> It appears as is so often the case that the usage has far outpaced the
> documentation and -EEXIST may be the proper code to return.
>
> The correct answer here may be to modify the documentation to note the
> additional semantic, though if the usage is solely within the kernel it
> may be sufficient to explain its use in the header comment for the
> routine (in this case sparse_add_one_section()).

Is this really worth? It is a well known problem that errno codes are
far from sufficient to describe error codes we need. Yet we are stuck
with them more or less. I really do not see any point changing this
particular path, nor spend a lot of time whether one inappropriate
code is any better than another one. The code works as intended AFAICS.

I would stick with all good rule of thumb. It works, do not touch it too
much.

I am sorry to be snarky but hasn't this generated way much more email
traffic than it really deserves? A simply and trivial clean up in the
beginning that was it, right?
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs