Of course, the maintainer gets the last word regardless of what anyone else thinks. Generally, minimal code is better. Trying to future proof code is a waste of time because you can't predict what will happen in the future. It's way more likely that some pointer you never expected to be NULL will be NULL instead of the few checked at the beginning of a function. Adding useless code uses RAM and makes the function slower. It's a bit confusing for users as well because they will wonder when the NULL check is used. A lot of times this sort of error handling is a bit fake and what I mean is that it looks correct but the system will just crash in a later function. Also especially with a simple NULL dereferences like this theoretical one, it's better to just get the oops. It kills the module but you get a good message in the log and it's normally straight forward to debug. We spent a surprising amount of time discussing useless code. I made someone redo a patch yesterday because they had incomplete error handling for a situation which could never happen. regards, dan carpenter -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
