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Date:      Tue, 27 Mar 2001 13:59:39 -0500
From:      Coleman Kane <cokane@FreeBSD.ORG>
To:        Devin Butterfield <dbutter@wireless.net>
Cc:        Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>, Coleman Kane <cokane@FreeBSD.ORG>, Roger Hardiman <roger@cs.strath.ac.uk>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Porting a Linux driver to FreeBSD with ioctl return values
Message-ID:  <20010327135939.A6753@cokane.yi.org>
In-Reply-To: <01032701051000.83707@dbm.wireless.net>; from dbutter@wireless.net on Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 01:05:10AM -0800
References:  <3ABF45B6.DF5A0B7F@cs.strath.ac.uk> <20010327015524.A863@cokane.yi.org> <20010326232431.Q9431@fw.wintelcom.net> <01032701051000.83707@dbm.wireless.net>

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Yeah, that's the basic gist of things I got from talking with people
as well. I suppose the feeling is that if it works and doessn't seem
to cause any harm it should be a 'feature'. Personally, I never liked
the idea of having ioctl's return like that. Something about it seemed
unclean and dirty...

Devin Butterfield had the audacity to say:
> On Monday 26 March 2001 11:24, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> > * Coleman Kane <cokane@FreeBSD.ORG> [010326 22:40] wrote:
> > > Yeah, that's basically what I had to do in tdfx. You can take a look int
> > > src/sys/dev/tdfx/tdfx_pci.c under tdfx_ioctl(...) to get an idea of what
> > > needs to be done, if you need more info. Tdfx basically implements the
> > > API from device_3dfx in Linux.
> >
> > Is there anyone we can PLEAD with to explain that to the linnux people
> > that that's a broken way to implement ioctl()?
> 
> I did the original port of the linux telephony driver that Roger Hardiman has 
> been kind enough to volunteer taking up maintainership of, and I butted heads 
> with this problem (and the people who were perpetuating it) I can assure you. 
> The author of the linux driver agreed that it wasn't the right way to do it, 
> and I managed to convince him that it needed to be changed, but Alan Cox 
> refused to accept any changes to the linux telephony API (regardless of the 
> fact that it was "broken"). The fear was that it would break existing 
> applications which depended on this ioctl hack. And so the breakage is 
> perpetuated, on and on...
> --
> Regards, Devin.
> 

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