Re: [PATCH 25/20] sysfs: Only support removing emtpy sysfs directories.

Eric W. Biederman
2009-05-25T07:44:49Z

Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org> writes:

>> Let's make the plan to investigate these, and see how hard it would be
>> to actually remove these with the current device/sysfs infrastructure.
>>
>> Fixing the users and adding back auto-deletion are the only two real options.
>
> Seems, we should remove non-directory files, which in most cases belong
> to the kobject itself, but the user's cleanup logic does not cover the
> removal of the created files.
>
> But I think, we should still warn, if we find a sub-directory inside a
> directory we are going to remove.

So far complaining about deleting non-empty directories is finding
real bugs. It does not appear that too many users that delete
non-empty directories.

My plan moving forward is to see what has goofed and how hard it is to
change the callers to clean up after themselves. If it is not a pain
to fix the callers who forget to delete their attributes that looks
like the right way forward.

It is certainly the principle of least surprise.

Eric