Al Viro [off-list ref] writes:

Another thing that keeps bugging me about prepend_path() is the
set of return values.  I mean, 0/1/2/3/-ENAMETOOLONG, and all
except 0 are unlikely?  Might as well make that 0/1/2/3/-1, if
not an outright 0/1/2/3/4.  And prepend() could return bool, while
we are at it (true - success, false - overflow)...

I remember seeing that the different callers of prepend_path treated
those different cases differently.

But now that I look again the return value 3 (escaped) gets lumped
together with 2(detached).


On second look it appears that the two patterns that we actually have
are basically:

char *__d_path(const struct path *path,
	       const struct path *root,
	       char *buf, int buflen)
{
	error = prepend_path(path, root, &res, &buflen);

	if (error < 0)
		return ERR_PTR(error);
	if (error > 0)
		return NULL;
	return res;
}

char *d_absolute_path(const struct path *path,
	       char *buf, int buflen)
{
	error = prepend_path(path, &root, &res, &buflen);

	if (error > 1)
		error = -EINVAL;
	if (error < 0)
		return ERR_PTR(error);
	return res;
}

With d_absolute_path deciding that return value 1 absolute is not an
error.

That does look like there is plenty of room to refactor and make things
clearer.


Eric