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Date:      Sun, 17 Nov 2002 11:22:10 -0800
From:      Luigi Rizzo <luigi@FreeBSD.ORG>
To:        Sam Leffler <sam@errno.com>
Cc:        cvs-committers@FreeBSD.ORG, cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/sys/net raw_usrreq.c
Message-ID:  <20021117112210.A18801@xorpc.icir.org>
In-Reply-To: <082201c28e65$c5b352e0$52557f42@errno.com>; from sam@errno.com on Sun, Nov 17, 2002 at 10:18:45AM -0800
References:  <200211171814.gAHIE4I6006212@repoman.freebsd.org> <082201c28e65$c5b352e0$52557f42@errno.com>

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On Sun, Nov 17, 2002 at 10:18:45AM -0800, Sam Leffler wrote:
> Why are you making ALL these cosmetic changes now?  I understood why you did
> the multicast routing code, but these seem entirely w/o reason.

I would not classify them as cosmetic, but rather as documentation.
The motivation is the following:

Whenever i look at some code, especially some i am not totally
familiar with, i always have a hard time figuring out why different
functions are used to do what is apparently the same thing (m_copy()
vs. m_copypacket(), in this case) or whether a '0' is a pure number,
or a NULL pointer or INADDR_ANY or some other error code, or what
is the real scope of a local variable in a 500+ line function, or
whether a global variable can give problems when we try to split
locks for sections of the kernel.

I don't think I am alone in having these difficulties. Besides, it is
not unlikely that people takes some of this code as an example to write
new one, forgetting some of the original assumptions, and then leading to
widespread errors. See as an example the misuse of  M_DONTWAIT and M_NOWAIT
we have had in the past, the breakage in timeout handling in several
network drivers, and the problem in IFF_ALLMULTI that i recently
reported.

So my general attitude is try and document these things as i step
through them, to avoid me and possibly others further confusion in
the future.

And if in passing there is a small amount of formatting fixup i try
to do that as well. Larger whitespace commits i do separately, but
for a few lines it seems to me overkill to have a separate commit.

	cheers
	luigi

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