Re: [PATCH] Illustration of warning explosion silliness

Jeff Garzik
2006-09-28T04:19:40Z

Andrew Morton wrote:
> And it's not sufficient to say "gee, I can't think of any reason why this
> handler would return an error, so I'll design its callers to assume that".
> It is _much_ better to design the callers to assume that callees _can_
> fail, and to stick the `return 0;' into the terminal callee. Because
> things can change.

huh? You're going off on a tangent. I agree with the above, just like
I already agreed that SCSI needs better error checking.

You're ignoring the API issue at hand. Let me say it again for the
cheap seats: "search" You search a list, and stick a pointer somewhere
when found. No hardware touched. No allocations. Real world. There
is an example of usage in the kernel today.

Yes, SCSI needs better error checking. Yes, device_for_each_child()
actors _may_ return errors. No, that doesn't imply
device_for_each_child() actors must be FORCED BY DESIGN to return error
codes. It's just walking a list. The current implementation and API is
fine... save for the "__must_check" marker itself. The actor CAN return
an error code via the current API.

CAN, not MUST. (using RFC language)

Jeff