On 04/21/2014 04:02 PM, Rich Felker wrote: > On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 09:45:35AM -0400, Jeff Layton wrote: >> File-private locks have been merged into Linux for v3.15, and *now* >> people are commenting that the name and macro definitions for the new >> file-private locks suck. >> >> ....and I can't even disagree. The names and command macros do suck. >> >> We're going to have to live with these for a long time, so it's >> important that we be happy with the names before we're stuck with them. >> >> The consensus on the lists so far is that they should be rechristened as >> "file-description locks". >> >> This patch makes the following changes that I think are necessary before >> v3.15 ships: >> >> 1) rename the command macros to their new names. These end up in the uapi >> headers and so are part of the external-facing API. It turns out that >> glibc doesn't actually use the fcntl.h uapi header, but it's hard to >> be sure that something else won't. Changing it now is safest. >> >> 2) make the the /proc/locks output display these as type "FDLOCK" >> >> The rest of the renaming can wait until v3.16, since everything else >> isn't visible outside of the kernel. > > I'm sorry I didn't chime in on this earlier, but I really prefer the > (somewhat bad) current naming ("private") to the > ridiculously-confusing use of "FD" to mean "file descriptION" when > everybody is used to it meaning "file descriptOR". The potential for > confusion that these are "file descriptOR locks" (they're not) is much > more of a problem, IMO, than the confusion about what "private" means > (since it doesn't have an established meaning in this context. > > Thus my vote is for leaving things the way the kernel did it already.
There's at least two problems to solve here: 1) "File private locks" is _meaningless_ as a term. Elsewhere (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.network.samba.internals/76414/focus=1685376), I suggested various alternatives. "File-handle locks [*]" was my initial preference, and I also suggested "file-description locks" and noted the drawbacks of that term. I think it's insufficient to say "stick with the existing poor name"--if you have something better, then please propose it. (Note by the way that for nearly a decade now, the open(2) man page has followed POSIX in using the term "open file description. Full disclosure: of course, I'm responsible for that change in the man page.) 2) The new API constants (F_SETLKP, F_SETLKPW, F_GETLKP) have names that are visually very close to the traditional POSIX lock names (F_SETLK, F_SETLKW, F_GETLK). That's an accident waiting to happen when someone mistypes in code and/or misses such a misttyping when reading code. That really must be fixed. Cheers, Michael [*] "File-handle locks" was considered by Jeff to be a little confusing because of the term elsewhere, such as NFS. I take the point, though I'd still prefer it over "File-handle locks". -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/