Hello,
Recently, there was a bikeshed on one of the lists dealing with
whether or not to rename M_WAIT and M_DONTWAIT flags to something else
that would "communicate more of the Right Thing" to developers
considering that for mbuf allocations, M_WAIT may return a NULL pointer
in the case where all mbuf resources are depleted and mbuf_wait time has
already been spent waiting.
The proposed flag names were/are:
M_WAIT --> M_TRY_WAIT
M_DONTWAIT --> M_DONTBLOCK
I have a diff sitting here:
http://people.freebsd.org/~bmilekic/m_flag_rnm.diff
It's roughly 160K.
On one side, personally, I wasn't so pro-the change, as I see it more
as a bloat to the repo than anything else. But, I have to admit that some
folks have expressed a significant interest in having them changed and
with reason, so I agreed to do it. On this same side, it wasn't such a
bad thing to do after all as it led me to spot some not so obfuscated and
obfuscated (and potentially serious in the future) bugs which I have yet
to fix. A good example is people mixing up M_WAIT and M_WAITOK in calls
to malloc() which could potentially lead to disaster if we were to alter
the values of the flags.
On the other side, I personally do not passionately feel the change
"needs" to be made. But, as mentionned, if the majority of developers
think that it will avoid needless miscommunication, then I have no
problem committing it.
I don't want to start a bigger bikeshed from this post than it
already is. I'd just like to know if anyone has any reasonable objections
to having this change happen.
Regards,
Bosko Milekic
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