On 7/10/22 09:49, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
Am Fri, Oct 07, 2022 at 09:07:10AM +1300 schrieb Lloyd Parkes:That's a good point. Personally, I had forgotten that unlinking directories was a thing. We should put a comment in the code for unlink_file() about that.Well, if you read the code you should start to wonder why it does the whole lstat + check for directory dance...
Yeah, nah. Only people those few people who are actually still using antique Unix systems will be able to work this out. Everyone else will need to be psychic and that isn't an acceptable way to write code.
This code is in the core NetBSD source tree (usr.bin/make) and the unlink_file() function has no use in NetBSD. This is intrinsically worth documenting.
I have to admit that I sometimes wonder whether or not it is true that the bulk of the comments in the *BSD code base is in fact the BSD license repeated across each .c file. If we can spend 30 seconds typing in a one line comment that saves one person 15 minutes of head scratching, then we have already made our software more efficient as a code base to use.
Lloyd