Re: [PATCH] drivers/scsi/aic7xxx_old: Convert to generic boolean-values

James Bottomley
2007-02-16T18:42:36Z

On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 10:34 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 10:42:12 -0600 James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@SteelEye.com> wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 2007-02-12 at 12:27 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > Given that we now have a standard kernel-wide, c99-friendly way of
> > > expressing true and false, I'd suggest that this decision can be revisited.
> > >
> > > Because a "true" is significantly more meaningful (and hence readable)
> > > thing than a bare "1".
> >
> > OK, I'm really not happy with doing this for three reasons:
> >
> > 1. It's inviting huge amounts of driver churn changing bitfields to
> > booleans
> >
> > 2. I do find it to be a readability issue. Like most driver writers,
> > I'm used to register layouts, and those are simple bitfields, so I don't
> > tend to think true and false, I think 1 and 0.
> >
> > 3. Having a different, special, type for single bit bitfields (while
> > still using u<n> for multi bit bitfields) is asking for confusion, and
> > hence trouble at the driver level.
> >
>
> Confused. The patch changes TRUE to true and FALSE to false. The code
> wasn't using bitfields before and isn't using them afterwards. I wouldn't
> expect there to be any change in generated code.

Sorry, I was addressing the general idea of using booleans in drivers.

> All it's doing is replacing the driver's private TRUE/FALSE with the
> kernel-wide ones.

I already addressed that one ... I prefer bare 0 and 1. However, if the
driver writer wants to use TRUE/FALSE, I won't specifically reject it.
I really don't like the lower case true/false.

James