log why the permission is denied

Posted Jan 20, 2013 1:25 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: log why the permission is denied by Cyberax
Parent article: Making EPERM friendlier

the ash-heap of history is littered by companies and organizations that have decided that everyone else was wrong, and they knew better and could design such a great system that everyone else would abandon what they use to jump on board.

You act as if the POSIX (and Single Unix Specification) standard is something handed down from on high that hasn't changed in 20 years.

The last revision to POSIX and SUS took place within the last couple of years, and the next one will take place within the next few years.

These standards work by looking at the things that people are developing, and getting consensus between the different developers as to what they can agree on, They then have those developers go and implement what they are proposing, and it only gets into the standard after there are running implementations.

by definition this means that they encourage new, non-standard, things to be developed and deployed (they can't add something to the standard if it hasn't been deployed yet)

The problem isn't with the idea of enhancing things, it's with the idea that standards don't matter, nobody else matters, only develop for yourself and to #$% with everyone else.

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log why the permission is denied

Posted Jan 20, 2013 1:31 UTC (Sun) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] (6 responses)

The ashheap of history is littered with *nix companies. And Microsoft is still out there. History's statement on the matter tells me that you've got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, and know when to run. Neither standards nor standard-free innovation is a guarantee of anything.

90% of companies and organizations fail quickly no matter what they do.

log why the permission is denied

Posted Jan 21, 2013 23:13 UTC (Mon) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (5 responses)

Microsoft's Win32 uses simple integer error codes.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc231199.aspx

So this kind of rant is offtopic in more ways than one...

log why the permission is denied

Posted Jan 22, 2013 17:51 UTC (Tue) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (1 responses)

And windows has one of my favorite error codes/constant names!

ERROR_SUCCESS, of course :)

-stu

log why the permission is denied

Posted Jan 23, 2013 0:36 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

... possibly brought by the same people who gave us the Start->Shut Down menu item.

PS: I thought Windows 7 got rid of the "Start" name but I just found it is still showing as a tooltip.

log why the permission is denied

Posted Jan 24, 2013 11:19 UTC (Thu) by sorokin (guest, #88478) [Link] (2 responses)

No. Since introduction of COM it uses IErrorInfo in addition to HRESULT.

log why the permission is denied

Posted Jan 30, 2013 5:53 UTC (Wed) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (1 responses)

COM is a userspace thing, similar to DBus or CORBA. We are discussing kernel APIs here.

log why the permission is denied

Posted Jan 30, 2013 7:33 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Not really, COM is also used in kernel. IErrorInfo also supports marshalling across processes.

log why the permission is denied

Posted Jan 20, 2013 1:36 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

> the ash-heap of history is littered by companies and organizations that have decided that everyone else was wrong, and they knew better and could design such a great system that everyone else would abandon what they use to jump on board.
And with even more companies that decided to "stick to standards" and stop innovating (e.g. basically all commercial UNIX vendors).

> You act as if the POSIX (and Single Unix Specification) standard is something handed down from on high that hasn't changed in 20 years.
Yep. Not much has changed in important areas, changes are mostly cosmetic (and yes, we've actually paid for copies of official POSIX standards).

For example, my another pet peeve - signals are useless for library writers because there's no mechanism to allocate/reserve them or to pass parameters to a signal handler.

> The last revision to POSIX and SUS took place within the last couple of years, and the next one will take place within the next few years.
Will it include cgroups, namespaces, kqueue? No?

> The problem isn't with the idea of enhancing things, it's with the idea that standards don't matter, nobody else matters, only develop for yourself and to #$% with everyone else.
And yet, the recent history shows us that this very attitude works. Most "community projects" end up dead after extensive bike-shedding flamewars.

log why the permission is denied

Posted Jan 20, 2013 14:17 UTC (Sun) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link]

> For example, my another pet peeve - signals are useless for library
> writers because there's no mechanism to allocate/reserve them or to pass
> parameters to a signal handler.

You may wish to look into sigaction(SA_SIGINFO) and sigqueue() used with POSIX.1b real-time signals... That at least solves your second issue... As for your first, I'd think just using sigaction() to peek at the current handler would tell you if a signal is currently already in use or not...