[Devel] Re: [RFC][PATCH] rename 'struct pid'

[Dave Hansen]

On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 14:54 -0600, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Dave Hansen <hansendc at us.ibm.com> writes:
> 
> > On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 12:46 -0600, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> >> 
> >> > These can be a bit confusing:
> >> >
> >> >       struct pid *pid;
> >> >       struct pid *pgrp;
> >> >       struct pid *sid;
> >> 
> >> How is it more confusing then?
> >> 
> >>         pid_t pid;
> >>         pid_t pgrp;
> >>         pid_t sid; 
> >
> > They confuse me the same way. :)
> >
> > We can't do much about userspace.  But, we do have quite a bit of
> > control how we name things in the kernel, and I think there's a better
> > way.
> 
> Maybe.
> 
> The worst of those above is:
> pid_t pid;
> 
> Am I correct?

Definitely.

> When someone mentions a pid which side of the above statement are you
> thinking of the left hand side or the right hand side.   The type or
> the variable name.

Traditionally, I think of a pid as what I see in top.  So, I think of
the right hand side variable name.  I think of it this way because the
left hand side has little meaning in how the pid_t is going to be used.

>   If the issue is that you find the concept of pid_t confusing then it
>   is much harder to sort this out.

I find pid_t confusing.  There, I've said it. ;)

In a perfect world, kill() wouldn't be multiplexed the way it is.  We'd
have kill_myself(), kill_pgrp(pgrp), kill_pid() and the pid_t passed
into kill_pid() there would only mean 'process id', only and could
_never_ mean 'process group id'.

We could even have different data structures so that type safety would
keep get_pgrp()'s result from being easily fed to kill_pgrp().

-- Dave

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