Re: fixing compat_12 getdents

[christos%astron.com@localhost (Christos Zoulas)]

In article <20121210195346.GA8090%apb-laptoy.apb.alt.za@localhost>,
Alan Barrett  <apb%cequrux.com@localhost> wrote:
>> 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.

We need to be careful here because the set of errnos returned by
many syscalls is fixed by POSIX etc.

christos