Hello Kees, I'm late to the party, and only just caught up with the fuss :-). On 12/14/2017 12:19 AM, Kees Cook wrote: > On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 6:40 AM, Cyril Hrubis <chrubis@xxxxxxx> wrote: >> Hi! >>> You selected stupid name for a flag. Everyone and their dog agrees >>> with that. There's even consensus on better name (and everyone agrees >>> it is better than .._SAFE). Of course, we could have debate if it is >>> NOREPLACE or NOREMOVE or ... and that would be bikeshed. This was just >>> poor naming on your part. >> >> Well while everybody agrees that the name is so bad that basically >> anything else would be better, there does not seem to be consensus on >> which one to pick. I do understand that this frustrating and fruitless. > > Based on the earlier threads where I tried to end the bikeshedding, it > seemed like MAP_FIXED_NOREPLACE was the least bad option. > >> So what do we do now, roll a dice to choose new name? >> >> Or do we ask BFDL[1] to choose the name? > > I'd like to hear feedback from Michael Kerrisk, as he's had to deal > with these kinds of choices in the past. I'm fine to ask Linus too. I > just want to get past the name since the feature is quite valuable. > > And if Michal doesn't want to touch this patch any more, I'm happy to > do the search/replace/resend. :P Something with the prefix MAP_FIXED_ seems to me obviously desirable, both to suggest that the function is similar, and also for easy grepping of the source code to look for instances of both. MAP_FIXED_SAFE didn't really bother me as a name, but MAP_FIXED_NOREPLACE (or MAP_FIXED_NOCLOBBER) seem slightly more descriptive of what the flag actually does, so a little better. Cheers, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/
