On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 05:43:18PM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Alan Stern wrote:
> >I'd like to lodge a bitter complaint about the return codes used by
> >queue_work() and related functions:
> >
> > Why do the damn things return 0 for error and 1 for success???
> > Why don't they use negative error codes for failure, like
> > everything else in the kernel?!!
>
> It's a standard programming idiom: return false (0) for failure, true
> (non-zero) for success. Boolean.
There are at least 3 idioms:
1) return 0 on success, -E on fail¹.
rv = foo();
if (rv < 0)
...
2) return 1 on YES, 0 on NO.
3) return valid pointer on OK, NULL on fail.
p = kmalloc();
if (!p)
...
#2 should only be used if condition in question is spelled nice:
if (license_is_gpl_compatible())
...
else
ATI_you_can_fuck_off_too();
The question is into which category queue_work() fails.
> Certainly the kernel often uses the -errno convention, but it's not a rule.
¹ BSD returns E* where E* is negative and thus avoids "return E*;" bugs (where E
is positive).
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