On Tue, 23.09.08 14:38, Ralf Corsepius (rc040203@xxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > > On Tue, 2008-09-23 at 14:21 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote: > > On Tue, 23.09.08 10:54, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski (dominik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > > > Oh my. So you know someone who thinks that ioctl()s are ingenious API > > design? > What do ioctls and files/stream not provide that you are missing? > > ioctls essentially are "descriptor"/"tag"/"arbitrary argument". > An interface can hardly be more generic than this. Yes, and the fact that it is that generic is the weakness. You know, we have this wonderful language called C. It's all about tape-safety and having nice names for things and having proper signatures for functions and being descriptive. ioctl()s go against all that. They are not type-safe, have unreadable names, have no signatures and are everthing but descriptive. Let's say every single libc call would have been mutlipexed by a single function call. i.e. instead of calling malloc() like this: a = malloc(4711); you'd call: a = (void*) libc(LC_MLLC, 4711); Now think of hwo your program would look like in its entirety: unreadable. Absolutely crazy and unreadable. Now ioctl() does exactly this: a vast number of function calls are multiplexed via a single function call. Big fuckup. And everyone who claims that that would be good API design is just wrong, really, really wrong. It's not good. It's a fuckup. It's terrible. Lennart -- Lennart Poettering Red Hat, Inc. lennart [at] poettering [dot] net ICQ# 11060553 http://0pointer.net/lennart/ GnuPG 0x1A015CC4 -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
