From: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
To: Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>
Cc: Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>,
Kernel development list <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>,
David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>,
Kai Petzke <wpp@marie.physik.tu-berlin.de>,
"Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Subject: Re: Complaint about return code convention in queue_work() etc.
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 15:41:51 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20060818154151.e92d4246.akpm@osdl.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <44E63476.201@garzik.org>
On Fri, 18 Aug 2006 17:43:18 -0400
Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org> wrote:
> Alan Stern wrote:
> > I'd like to lodge a bitter complaint about the return codes used by
> > queue_work() and related functions:
> >
> > Why do the damn things return 0 for error and 1 for success???
> > Why don't they use negative error codes for failure, like
> > everything else in the kernel?!!
>
> It's a standard programming idiom: return false (0) for failure, true
> (non-zero) for success. Boolean.
>
> Certainly the kernel often uses the -errno convention, but it's not a rule.
>
The predominant convention in the kernel is 0==success and I do think that
the change which Alan suggests would be kinder to the
principle-of-least-surprise.
But if you're going to change the function's return conventions, please
also rename the function.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2006-08-18 22:43 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2006-08-18 21:39 Complaint about return code convention in queue_work() etc Alan Stern
2006-08-18 21:43 ` Jeff Garzik
2006-08-18 22:41 ` Andrew Morton [this message]
2006-08-18 23:29 ` Alexey Dobriyan
2006-08-19 15:24 ` Alan Stern
2006-08-20 8:27 ` Jan Engelhardt
2006-08-20 16:58 ` Alan Stern
2006-08-20 22:06 ` Jan Engelhardt
2006-08-20 22:36 ` Alan Stern
2006-08-20 11:06 ` Ingo Molnar
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