On Jul 25, 2018, at 12:57 AM, Denis Ovsienko <[email protected]> wrote:
> Roughly a half of the libpcap man pages text uses the values -1 and -2 to
> discuss the return value of particular libpcap functions, the other half uses
> PCAP_ERROR and PCAP_ERROR_BREAK.
>
> Is there a good reason to keep it this way instead of using
> PCAP_ERROR/PCAP_ERROR_BREAK consistently in all man pages?
About the only reason for *code* not to use PCAP_ERROR and PCAP_ERROR_BREAK
would be if it has to compile with versions of libpcap prior to 1.0.
The only reason not to use PCAP_ERROR and PCAP_ERROR_BREAK in man pages for
APIs existing in pre-1.0 releases would be to discourage people from writing
code that wouldn't compile with pre-1.0 releases.
However, they could *also* just do
#ifndef PCAP_ERROR
#define PCAP_ERROR -1
#endif
#ifndef PCAP_ERROR_BREAK
#define PCAP_ERROR_BREAK -2
#endif
in the files that use them with those APIs, or in a header file included by
those files, so I'm not sure that's a strong enough reason not to just use them
uniformly.
And if they're making calls to APIs *not* present in pre-1.0 releases, their
code won't compile with a pre-1.0 release anyway, so....
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