[FFmpeg-devel] libossupport status

[François Revol]

> On Sat, Dec 29, 2007 at 02:35:55AM +0100, Fran?ois Revol wrote:
> > Just like with this return -EFOO thing. It's an Unixism that should 
> > die 
> 
> Unix does no such thing. RTFM POSIX/SUSv3. Error codes are in errno,
> not returned at all, which is admittedly also brain-damaged (global
> state) but a completely different issue.

It doesn't do it publically, but does it internally in the code, so 
does Linux.
And this way of returning errors is shamely reused in other things like 
OSS, up to apps. Even ffmpeg did that at some point (and still does but 
through a macro).

The global errno isn't such an issue, even BeOS works around it by 
#defining it to (*_errnop()) which returns the address of a TLS entry, 
and an exported global sticks there for single thread apps that insists 
on declaring it themselves.
I think glibc does that too now.

Granted it could have been simpler to just return the error from 
syscalls instead of -1, which BeOS does for native calls (returns EFOO 
as status_t).
It maintains a single error namespace with posix ones being a subset of 
them, and strerror() handles them all.
You are welcome to use Haiku and contribute :)

Fran?ois.