Re: Complaint about return code convention in queue_work() etc.

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

On Fri, 18 Aug 2006 17:43:18 -0400
Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org> 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.
> 
> Certainly the kernel often uses the -errno convention, but it's not a rule.
> 

The predominant convention in the kernel is 0==success and I do think that
the change which Alan suggests would be kinder to the
principle-of-least-surprise.

But if you're going to change the function's return conventions, please
also rename the function.

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