On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 05:21:49PM +0200, Marc Balmer wrote:
Am 23.06.2009 um 17:15 schrieb Thor Lancelot Simon:
On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 05:06:29PM +0200, Marc Balmer wrote:
Yes, already more than one program apparently use it. And at least
one
more once we have it ;)
Oh, my god, three programs use this bogus interface. That by itself
must be a reason to check it in!
care to elaborate a bit (on a technical level, if possible) why you
find
this interface bogus?
Returning an error *string* is so profoundly bogus I have trouble
imagining that anyone with more than a few weeks' experience
programming
in C doesn't see why.
1) You can't switch on an error string, so you can't really ever
programmatically do anything smart in response to failure.
2) If the error string is made a defined part of the interface, so
that
programs can "switch" on it using strcmp (UGH!), then the function
becomes inherently non-localizable.
3) We already have defined errno values for all the error cases this
function can reasonably be expected to encounter if properly
written.
"OpenBSD did it" is no more reason to dirty up our libc with this kind
of ill-considered interface than "SCO Xenix did it". NetBSD libc
should
not be the union of every mistake anyone ever made in libc in any
version
of Unix.
--
Thor Lancelot Simon
tls%rek.tjls.com@localhost
"Even experienced UNIX users occasionally enter rm *.* at the UNIX
prompt only to realize too late that they have removed the wrong
segment of the directory structure." - Microsoft WSS whitepaper