On 3/18/06, Andrew Morton <[email protected]> wrote:
> "Jesper Juhl" <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > > It would be strange to set an alarm for 0xffffffff seconds in the future
> > > but yeah, unless we can point at a reason why nobody could have ever been
> > > doing that, we should turn this into permanent, documented behaviour of
> > > Linux 2.6 and earlier, I'm afraid.
> > >
> >
> > How about 0xffffffff seconds into the future being the same as 136
> > years (unless I botched the math)... That means that if any Linux
> > application ever did that it's still waiting for the alarm and will be
> > for at least another century...
> > I'd say that makes it pretty certain that noone are doing or have been
> > doing that without spotting the problem somehow - apps with such a bug
> > are unlikely to be in production and actually working correctly.
>
> We just don't know. People do all sorts of things.
>
> How about this?
>
> $ cat /etc/my-expensive-app.conf
> #
> # Interval polling timer. Set this to -1 to disable
> #
> interval_polling_timer=-1
>
> We just don't know.
>
True, someone might be doing something like that, but consider this as well;
an app promts the user to enter a value and passes it on, expecting to
get EINVAL back if the value is wrong and has code in place to handle
that (like, say, prompt the user for a different value).
That app is not buggy, but it will not work correctly because *we* are buggy.
IMO we should cater to the correctly written app and prevent it from
breaking unexpectedly rather than continue to keep the buggy one
working.
--
Jesper Juhl <[email protected]>
Don't top-post http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/top-post.html
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