Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 23:39:36 +0300 From: Diomidis Spinellis <dds@aueb.gr> To: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> Cc: cvs-src@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/sys/kern init_main.c kern_malloc.c md5c.c subr_autoconf.c subr_mbuf.c subr_prf.c tty_subr.c vfs_cluster.c vfs_subr.c Message-ID: <3F243888.784795AC@aueb.gr> References: <65725.1059336010@critter.freebsd.dk>
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Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: > The thing which grinds in my ear about most of the tools I have ever > heard about is "specially annotated source code" or "model reflecting > the structure of the program" and similar. > > I personally don't want to have to express the same ting multiple > times, once for the compiler and once for each interested tool is > N-1 times too many. There are often hidden opportunities to avoid this problem. As an example, our section 2 manual pages document the error codes of each system call using the .Er macro. I find this type of documentation extremely valuable; when I get a strange error from a system call I can grep for the errno value in /sys to see what is going on. The lists are not complete; I have in the last year corrected two manual pages where a given return code was missing. I could write a tool to follow the call graph, locate all "errno = " assignments for each function call, and compare them against the corresponding manual page. As I see it, the main obstacle is the various vtables that make the static establishment of the call graph a lot more difficult. Note that FreeBSD is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this opportinity: consider that the Win32 SDK does not even document the possible errors a system call can generate and we are using a special macro for tagging the errno values in our documentation. Diomidis - http://www.spinellis.gr
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