linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 1/3] mm/sparse: Clean up the obsolete code comment

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Date:   Thu, 21 Mar 2019 11:35:21 +0100
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>
To:     William Kucharski <william.kucharski@...cle.com>
Cc:     Baoquan He <bhe@...hat.com>, Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>,
        Mike Rapoport <rppt@...ux.ibm.com>,
        Oscar Salvador <osalvador@...e.de>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Pavel Tatashin <pasha.tatashin@...cle.com>,
        rppt@...ux.vnet.ibm.com, richard.weiyang@...il.com,
        linux-mm@...ck.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/3] mm/sparse: Clean up the obsolete code comment

On Thu 21-03-19 04:24:35, William Kucharski wrote:
> 
> 
> > On Mar 21, 2019, at 3:21 AM, Baoquan He <bhe@...hat.com> wrote:
> 
> It appears as is so often the case that the usage has far outpaced the
> documentation and -EEXIST may be the proper code to return.
> 
> The correct answer here may be to modify the documentation to note the
> additional semantic, though if the usage is solely within the kernel it
> may be sufficient to explain its use in the header comment for the
> routine (in this case sparse_add_one_section()).

Is this really worth? It is a well known problem that errno codes are
far from sufficient to describe error codes we need. Yet we are stuck
with them more or less. I really do not see any point changing this
particular path, nor spend a lot of time whether one inappropriate
code is any better than another one. The code works as intended AFAICS.

I would stick with all good rule of thumb. It works, do not touch it too
much.

I am sorry to be snarky but hasn't this generated way much more email
traffic than it really deserves? A simply and trivial clean up in the
beginning that was it, right?
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs