[haiku-development] Re: POSIX error code
- From: kaoutsis <kaoutsis@xxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 21 May 2008 18:43:38 +0300
Ingo Weinhold wrote:
On 2008-05-21 at 01:05:51 [+0200], kaoutsis <kaoutsis@xxxxxx> wrote:
Ingo Weinhold wrote:
wrote:
Anyway, it certainly doesn't harm to try, but I have little hope that this
will have any effect. If the standard maintainers consider the request,
they are in a dilemma. Undoing the Issue 6 error codes change means that
all the applications that relied on it would become non-conforming.
I agree.
I had an idea how to tackle the problem, may be good, may be bad:
The main problem is not binary compatibility. The problem is that the Be API
requires that error codes be negative. E.g. create_sem() returns a
non-negative value (the sem_id) when successful, a negative error code
otherwise. A good deal of other functions/methods use the same strategy, and
so does third party code. Making our error codes positive will break them all.
Changing concerned API functions to return -1 and set errno would be an
option, but that would be quite a bit of work and third party software would
have to be changed as well. Personally I don't even find this option very
appealing.
Also, i didn't find this idea very appealing and that was the 'easy part';
i forgot the 'hard part' :-), just for the record here it is:
all the functions that returns semIds, areaIds etc, they would
check for errors like this:
area_id areaSpaceId;
areaSpaceId = create_area("AreaSpace",...
if (areaSpaceId < B_OK) {
problems:
a) In all similar current code places, the 0 should be replaced with B_OK
b) There must be an assurance that
the valid ids should not conflict with the error codes.
So in the hypothetical new haiku API the error codes
would be _positives_; and this change allows, in the same time,
someone to compile the code with gcc2 and
the error codes would be _negatives_ :-)
good bye,
Vasilis
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