From owner-freebsd-arch Sat May 6 18:41:15 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from fledge.watson.org (fledge.watson.org [204.156.12.50]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0CEEC37B57A for ; Sat, 6 May 2000 18:41:11 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Received: from fledge.watson.org (robert@fledge.pr.watson.org [192.0.2.3]) by fledge.watson.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id VAA03551 for ; Sat, 6 May 2000 21:41:10 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Date: Tue, 2 May 2000 21:19:38 -0400 (EDT) From: Robert Watson X-Sender: robert@fledge.watson.org To: freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.org Subject: Procedure for introducing new errno values? Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-ReSent-Date: Fri, 5 May 2000 18:59:44 -0400 (EDT) X-ReSent-From: robert X-ReSent-To: freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.org X-ReSent-Message-ID: Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG After some chat with various consumers of the extended attribute code, as well as interested parties in the Linux realm who are looking at providing a similar service over the Linux kernel, we've concluded that the current errno message range doesn't contain a value appropriate for ``Extended attribute not defined'' -- similar possibilities, such as ENOENT or ENODEV, do not uniquely describe the error condition and can be confusing. For example, ``File not found'' following a ``getextattr md5 /kernel'' suggests that /kernel was not found, not that the md5 attribute was not found. What is the correct procedure for adding new errno values? Presumably errno.8, src/sys/errno.h, as well as presumably some other files (perhaps in libc) for defining the string version, et al? I've also noticed that there is an errno.h in both /usr/include and /usr/include/sys. I am proposing EEXTATTR ("Extended attribute not defined"), which would be returned when a consumer of the VOP_GETEXTATTR() call attempted to retrieve an undefined attribute name. Robert N M Watson robert@fledge.watson.org http://www.watson.org/~robert/ PGP key fingerprint: AF B5 5F FF A6 4A 79 37 ED 5F 55 E9 58 04 6A B1 TIS Labs at Network Associates, Safeport Network Services To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message