From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Jul 6 09:25:05 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6C8E937B401 for ; Sun, 6 Jul 2003 09:25:04 -0700 (PDT) Received: from stork.mail.pas.earthlink.net (stork.mail.pas.earthlink.net [207.217.120.188]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CE0F543FDF for ; Sun, 6 Jul 2003 09:25:03 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tlambert2@mindspring.com) Received: from user-2ivfmrb.dialup.mindspring.com ([165.247.219.107] helo=mindspring.com) by stork.mail.pas.earthlink.net with asmtp (SSLv3:RC4-MD5:128) (Exim 3.33 #1) id 19ZCJw-0001RK-00; Sun, 06 Jul 2003 09:25:01 -0700 Message-ID: <3F084D1E.9C15E181@mindspring.com> Date: Sun, 06 Jul 2003 09:23:58 -0700 From: Terry Lambert X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.79 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: John-Mark Gurney References: <001901c34256$95e4db10$1200a8c0@gsicomp.on.ca> <20030704185032.GB605@funkthat.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-ELNK-Trace: b1a02af9316fbb217a47c185c03b154d40683398e744b8a473f9b5eb7b0e80534c864752b41471ea350badd9bab72f9c350badd9bab72f9c350badd9bab72f9c cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: RFC: Change to sys_errlist X-BeenThere: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Technical Discussions relating to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 06 Jul 2003 16:25:05 -0000 John-Mark Gurney wrote: > Matthew Emmerton wrote this message on Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 14:03 -0400: > > This is a RFC on a change to sys_errlist for errno = 0. [ ... ] > This is not good. This will just encourge more programers to not properly > test return values. Read man 2 errno says: "Successful calls never set > errno;", so this depends upon the programmer initalizing errno to 0 > before they make their call. If they are already so poor as to be > calling perror, etc with errno 0, then I doubt that we can depend upon > them initalizing errno to 0 and giving consistant results. I was tempted to say something similar, but tried to take the high road, instead, so that it didn't look like a gratuitous "different than Linux" comment. There are a lot of good reasons to *not* want to change the error message to "Success" without playing the "be like Linux" card. The one you cite here is just another one. In case it's not obvious... I'm agreeing with you. 8-). -- Terry