[haiku-development] Re: POSIX error code
- From: "François Revol" <revol@xxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 21 May 2008 14:59:30 +0200 CEST
>
> 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.
>
> To be honest, I don't like that either. Checking error codes happens
> virtually all over the place, at least in code I have written. That
> would
> be a major pain to change. I don't find the errno thing more elegant
> either, maybe I am missing something though.
You're not.
Besides, BeOS was about not making compromize just for compatibility.
Negated errors are much saner to use anyway, and there is no way we can
change that.
François.
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