On Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:45:39 -0700 Philip Guenther <[email protected]> wrote:
Many solid points and: >If the answers to those questions are "yes", then you should say so >and back it up. If not, why should we apply a diff to remove code >from someone who doesn't know why the code is there? As is, I believe >you don't understand why that code was added, don't understand when it >was triggered, and don't know whether or not it could still be >triggered. Although I'd rather crawl under a rock, I'll respond. You're correct. I got started on this train of thought after reading an old USENIX paper[1]. The line I suggested for deletion is identical to what section 1.2.1 of that paper recommended should always be included. Recent material continues to recommend such code, but not specifically in OpenBSD[2],[3]. Since such code is only rarely used in OpenBSD -- 9 occurrences in the whole tree -- I thought it might be an obsolete or inapplicable recommendation. One such occurrence was in m4/main.c, so I contacted the developer who had recently checked in that file. I did read manuals, study code, consider, and test first. But I knew my expertise was limited, and that there could be other considerations. I never said imperatively "delete this". I asked Stuart if it was a valid change. To you, I said it was "possible cruft". It's good that you are circumspect. Frankly, I was expecting the answer to be known. But if it's doubtful, the change has to be rejected. [1] http://www.darwinsys.com/history/canthappen.html [2] http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596009588 [3] http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr06/cos217/lectures/23signals.pdf -- Matt Fisher <[email protected]>
