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Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 14:45:05 -0400
To: Eric Anderson <anderson@centtech.com>, Tobias Roth <roth@iam.unibe.ch>
From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
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Subject: Re: struct dirent question
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At 11:31 AM -0500 8/16/06, Eric Anderson wrote:
>
>My point was, that either path you take (if BSD_VISIBLE is
>defined or not), you end up with d_name having a size of
>255 + 1, so what's the point the having it at all?

To make it clear that d_name is tied to the exact value
of MAXNAMLEN (just in case that value ever changes), and
it does not just happen to be 255+1 bytes for some reason
that is completely unrelated to MAXNAMLEN.

So if some programmer is working with the d_name variable,
and *if* they actually look at this include file, then
they'll immediately realize that any checks that they make
should use MAXNAMLEN, and not hard-code in the 255 value.

That's my 2-cents worth, at least...

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu