Linus Torvalds wrote:
> This, btw, is why Linux returns error numbers as -Exxx instead of using
> "-1" and "errno" - I dislike the latter enormously.
It's not just a matter of disliking it, it's also not reentrant.
> This is also why the VFS layer tends to use ERR_PTR/PTR_ERR/IS_ERR: it
> makes it very easy to pass back error information, and it makes it very
> hard to do it wrong. I suspect both minix and ext2 would be better off
> using that convention instead.
>
> It's not worth changing at this point, but for future reference it would
> probably be much preferable to return the error code instead of the
> horrible "error value through pointer access" method, which is usually
> rather inefficient too.
It would be nice if we could return a struct consisting of the error and
result. I'm not sure if this is allowed in C now or not. It didn't
work when I tried it with gcc: it seems to consider a struct-valued
function to be a void-valued. Odd.
--
Daniel
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