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authorLennart Poettering <lennart@poettering.net>2015-09-10 18:16:18 +0200
committerLennart Poettering <lennart@poettering.net>2015-09-10 18:16:18 +0200
commit59f448cf15f94bc5ebfd5b254de6f2441d02fbec (patch)
tree1d52fd0935cca0205c78fde6870abddb7aafd360 /CODING_STYLE
parentf33be3119806f96898dda6ade492fbdcdf8f79b8 (diff)
tree-wide: never use the off_t unless glibc makes us use it
off_t is a really weird type as it is usually 64bit these days (at least in sane programs), but could theoretically be 32bit. We don't support off_t as 32bit builds though, but still constantly deal with safely converting from off_t to other types and back for no point. Hence, never use the type anymore. Always use uint64_t instead. This has various benefits, including that we can expose these values directly as D-Bus properties, and also that the values parse the same in all cases.
Diffstat (limited to 'CODING_STYLE')
-rw-r--r--CODING_STYLE10
1 files changed, 10 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/CODING_STYLE b/CODING_STYLE
index f13f9becbc..98d99dcdaa 100644
--- a/CODING_STYLE
+++ b/CODING_STYLE
@@ -311,3 +311,13 @@
always-true expression for an infinite while() loop is our
recommendation is to simply write it without any such expression by
using "for (;;)".
+
+- Never use the "off_t" type, and particularly avoid it in public
+ APIs. It's really weirdly defined, as it usually is 64bit and we
+ don't support it any other way, but it could in theory also be
+ 32bit. Which one it is depends on a compiler switch chosen by the
+ compiled program, which hence corrupts APIs using it unless they can
+ also follow the program's choice. Moreover, in systemd we should
+ parse values the same way on all architectures and cannot expose
+ off_t values over D-Bus. To avoid any confusion regarding conversion
+ and ABIs, always use simply uint64_t directly.