On Tue, 12 Aug 2008, Al Viro wrote: > > you've just lost e.g. -EIO for getdents(). And if you bail out on > non-zero return value from vfs_readdir(), you are back to -EINVAL > on full buffer. Btw, this whole sentence, and the one from your next email seems to really show a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole readdir() error handling: > PS: we might get away with both, if we used _positive_ values as well. > E.g. have getdents() filldir return 1 if we are out of buffer *and* > have ->previous != NULL (and -EINVAL if we are out of buffer on the > first call)... And have some other positive constant for "->readdir() > didn't feel like going all the way to the end of directory". We *must* handle partial returns by returning "success". And we do, except for our _confusion_ about ->readdir() returning error and that somehow "overriding" the fact that it already returned non-errors earlier through the callback. All your blathering about "positive values as well" seems to ttoally misunderstand how readdir() works. We absolutely do *not* need positive return values, because the fact is, the only positive return value we ever need is the "we already filled _earlier_ buffers". And that's the one that we already do. The fact is, NO ERROR VALUE CAN POSSIBLY MATTER if we already returned one or more entries to getdents/readdir(). We should return a success value. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
