On Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:19:36 -0400 Jeff Garzik <jeff@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Andrew Morton wrote: > > And it's not sufficient to say "gee, I can't think of any reason why this > > handler would return an error, so I'll design its callers to assume that". > > It is _much_ better to design the callers to assume that callees _can_ > > fail, and to stick the `return 0;' into the terminal callee. Because > > things can change. > > huh? You're going off on a tangent. I agree with the above, just like > I already agreed that SCSI needs better error checking. No I'm not. I'm saying that the bugs which this exposed are a far, far more serious matter than a few false-positive warnings which need workarounds. > You're ignoring the API issue at hand. Let me say it again for the > cheap seats: "search" You search a list, and stick a pointer somewhere > when found. No hardware touched. No allocations. Real world. There > is an example of usage in the kernel today. If it's called in that fashion then the caller should still check the device_for_each_child() return value to find out if it actually got a match. Now it could be that the mysterious caller to which you refer uses the non-NULLness of some pointer to work out if a match occurred. Well shrug - add a BUG_ON(!device_for_each_child_return_value) or something. Or write a new version of device_for_each_child() which returns void and don't tell anyone about it. But let's not encourage error-ignoring. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
