Re: fixing compat_12 getdents

[Alan Barrett <apb%cequrux.com@localhost>]

> also, EINVAL doesn't seem like a great error code for this 
> condition.  it's not an input parameter that's causing the 
> error, but rather that the required output format cannot express 
> the data to be returned.  I think solaris uses EOVERFLOW for 
> this kind of situation, and ERANGE doesn't seem too bad either. 
> any opinions on that?

There's also E2BIG, but I don't think it fits.  ERANGE is 
documented in terms of "the available space", while EOVERFLOW is 
documented in terms of "a numeric result".  So perhaps EOVERFLOW 
for "integer is too large to fit in N bits", and ERANGE for 
"string is too long to fit in N bytes"?  Or vice versa?

Somebody(TM) should go through the errno(2) documentation and make 
the descriptions more generic, and add guidance for choosing which 
code to return.

--apb (Alan Barrett)