Linus Torvalds <[email protected]> wrote:
> ... and I do *not* see a huge advantage to a helper function that just wraps
> "list_empty()" with another name that is actually *less* descriptive.
I don't like list_empty() as the name of the function used to find out whether
an entry is on a list. Yes, technically, all it's doing is seeing if the
list_head is 'empty', but, linguistically, it looks wrong: the question you're
asking is not if the list is empty (you're not looking at the list head), but
if the entry is on a list.
So if I see in the code:
if (list_empty(p))
what is the test actually asking?
Note that various other list types in the kernel have separate "is the list
empty" and "is the entry on a list" primitives, though, granted, usually
because they require separate functions programmatically.
Anyway, I'll find a different way to do this, not involving checking the prev
pointer. What I don't want to do is hard code "prev == LIST_POISON2" into my
stuff. Anything like that really needs to be in list.h.
David
