Re: [GIT PATCH] More PCI patches for 2.6.13

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Fri, 9 Sep 2005, Greg KH wrote:
> 
> I fixed up all of the PCI core and USB drivers that were flagged by
> these warnings already.  Biggest area left is network drivers that I
> saw.

The reason I really dislike patches like these is that it causes people to 
do questionable things.

For example, there may be perfectly valid reasons why somebody doesn't
care about the result. I don't see much point in forcing people to check
the return value of "pci_enable_wake()" for example. There's really no
real reason to ever care, as far as I can tell - if it fails, there's 
nothing you can really do about it anyway.

Also, in general, the fact is that things like "pci_set_power_state()" 
might fail in _theory_, but we just don't care. A driver that doesn't 
check the return value is in practice as good a driver as one that does, 
and forcing people to add code that is totally useless in reality - or 
look at a warning that is irritating - is just not very productive.

There are functions where it is really _important_ to check the error 
return, because they return errors often enough - and the error case is 
something you have to do something about - that it's good to force people 
to be aware.

But "pci_set_power_state()"?

I don't think so.

		Linus
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