Hi! > > 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. > > Thanks for the discussion. > > Interesting. The amount of code bloat here compiles down to about two > machine instructions (in two places). Actually a little more since I should > be using IS_ERR_OR_NULL. But the main question is whether I should do > it at all. > > The behaviour I should drive here is that the user will do their own error > checking. After they get a pointer to a FPGA manager using > of_fpga_mgr_get(), they should check it and not assume that > fpga_mgr_firmware_load() will do it for them, i.e. > > mgr = of_fpga_mgr_get(mgr_node); > if (IS_ERR(mgr)) > return PTR_ERR(mgr); > fpga_mgr_firmware_load(mgr, flags, path); > > I could take out these NULL pointer checks and it won't hurt anything unless > someone is just using the functions badly, in which case: kablooey. 2 instructions is not that bad, do whatever is easier for you. These patches received enough bikeshed painting. Best regards, Pavel -- (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek (cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://driverdev.linuxdriverproject.org/mailman/listinfo/driverdev-devel
