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Message-Id: <200802061755.27057.rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2008 17:55:26 +1100
From: Rusty Russell <rusty@...tcorp.com.au>
To: Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc: adobriyan@...ru, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Whine about suspicious return values from module's ->init() hook
On Wednesday 06 February 2008 10:37:52 Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Wed, 6 Feb 2008 09:48:10 +1100
>
> Rusty Russell <rusty@...tcorp.com.au> wrote:
> > > It's a no-brainer.
> >
> > For non-developers, WARN_ON is a noop.
>
> Oh.. Rusty. The mailing list and bugzilla are *full* of WARN_ON reports
> from testers. Your statement is empirically wrong.
My apologies. I had extrapolated from my own behaviour: I don't notice
WARN_ON unless something else goes wrong to make me look in the logs.
> > BUG_ON() will make us fix it in return for short-term pain.
>
> Pain to our users and testers. People upon whom we are very dependent and
> to whom we are hugely indebted. People who I have to spend a lot of time
> defending from the likes of you!
I think you misunderstand. I proposed that we audit all the code before such
a change. We shouldn't do *anything* until we can estimate the impact this
change will have.
Our users deserve better than "I don't know if this will break anything so I
used WARN_ON". They deserve "we have confidence that this change won't break
any existing code".
Now, if an audit is impractical or unreliable, we are better off with a
WARN_ON. But it is still an admission of ignorance.
Cheers,
Rusty.
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