Re: [Qemu-devel] [6324] Return -errno on write failure (Gleb Natapov)

[Anthony Liguori]

François Revol wrote:
> > So BeOS is not ANSI C !
> >     
>
> And so, well, what ?
> It won't change any time soon.
> Besides, there is no reason a language stantard should dictate such a 
> runtime thing...
> And for what I've seen from it, it's not consistent with itself, saying 
> non-zero on a line, positive on the next one.
>
> Btw, was it available freely at the time ? I mean don't expect people 
> to comply with something you have to pay for. That's what you get. 
> (hint, POSIX drafts)
>
> It's not like any other OS I've seen doesn't violate some standard.
>
> Still, everything has been fine for a decade and suddenly people start 
> doing this kind of tricks out of the blue. It's not like considering 
> errno can be !=0 is orthogonal to the standard, so supporting BeOS 
> itself would't make the code itself violate ANSI C.
>   

If a full set of patches was posted that to QEMU that made the latest 
SVN compile on BeOS with a free compiler, I would think we would 
evaluate them and determine how intrusive the changes were compared to 
the value of supporting BeOS and apply them if appropriate.  Avoiding 
-errno, IMHO, is a fair trade off to support another platform even if 
there is a niche user base.

That said, such patches have not been posted.  I don't think it's wise 
to get into a habit of avoiding things because some random platform that 
QEMU doesn't support today doesn't support said feature.

So I'm not inclined to change code that conforms to ANSI unless someone 
puts the work into supporting BeOS in mainline QEMU and that said work 
doesn't require very invasive changes.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> François.
>
>
>