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Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2008 15:51:39 +1100 (EST)
From: Bruce Evans <brde@optusnet.com.au>
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To: Alfred Perlstein <alfred@freebsd.org>
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Cc: arch@freebsd.org, Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>
Subject: Re: RFC: sysctl additional functions/macros
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On Thu, 3 Jan 2008, Alfred Perlstein wrote:

> * Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org> [080103 18:25] wrote:
>> Alfred Perlstein wrote:
>>> Yes, but EINVAL please.
>>
>> I wondered who would be the first to complain about that..
>>
>> "Gee you Juniper people have no sense of humour" :-)  :-)
>
> I just don't see any point in prefering one non-descriptive error
> message over another, other than to confuse/annoy people.

The correct errno (ERANGE) would be descriptive and wouldn't conflict
with the documented meaning of EINVAL.

Checking bounds is good in theory, but the only time I had a problem
with a bound in sysctl was when it enforced an unnecessarily high lower
bound for an interrupt moderation timeout.  It took an edit to test
all values that the hardware supports.

Bruce