[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Bunch of accumulated patches...

[Rich Felker]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 01:47:27AM +0100, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> > Ah yeah I forgot the positivity requirement. So negative values makes
> > it easy to define your own errors.
> 
> functions in libav* return negative ints as errors
> we will not change all int return types to long long (because its inefficient
> on 32bit archs), so the positivity vs. negativity doesnt help
> 
> this leaves 4 obvious options
> 1. drop all usage of POSIX E*

This would probably be my preference.

> 2. only use POSIX E* (that is somewhat limiting as many errors cases dont
>    have a reasonably matching E* from POSIX)

Also somewhat reasonable but I agree it's limiting. Could you give
some examples of what errors are used for in libav* so the
requirements are a bit clearer?

> 3. just pick random values for our extra error codes, theres a
>    philosophical collision possibility

While this would probably work in practice unless someone
intentionally designed a nasty system to clash with it, it's ugly and
hackish beyond all imagination..

> 4. add a check to configure to choose unused E* (this is easy by using
>    strerror())

Are you sure? strerror returns a string for unknown errors, and the
string it returns is implementation-defined. I don't see how it can
help you identify which error values are unused.

Rich