Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2011 09:26:05 -0400
From: Jim Rees <rees@umich.edu>
To: Luk Claes <luk@debian.org>
Cc: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>, Steve Dickson <SteveD@redhat.com>,
        linux-nfs@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Do not segfault because of kernel version
Message-ID: <20110703132605.GC9889@merit.edu>
References: <1309617149-3993-1-git-send-email-luk@debian.org>
 <20110703150421.2db09d94@notabene.brown>
 <4E100E17.5000304@debian.org>
 <20110703130237.GA9889@merit.edu>
 <4E106A56.1050802@debian.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
In-Reply-To: <4E106A56.1050802@debian.org>
Sender: linux-nfs-owner@vger.kernel.org
MIME-Version: 1.0

Luk Claes wrote:

  > You can't return -1 from a function returning unsigned int.  I think you
  > want to return something like
  > 
  > MAKE_VERSION(9999, 255, 255)
  
  Would it not be better to return UINT_MAX in that case to avoid having
  to change it when version 10000 would be released and to avoid overflows
  that could potentially order lower?

Maybe.  I wanted the second and third numbers to be the max possible (255).
But of course they will be anyway if you return UINT_MAX and are running on
an architecture that represents ints in two's complement binary.  Which is
the case today, but wasn't there a port of unix to the System 36 at one
time?  Ok, that's just silly.

Yes, just return UINT_MAX.  Fix the other error return too, the one where
uname fails.  And put in a comment if you can briefly summarize Linus's
argument.