On Wed, 2025-04-30 at 09:30 +0200, gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > > added back in 2019, and why was that functionality *added* to > > debugfs_remove? > > So we didn't have 2 functions that did the same thing and no one wanted > to sweep the tree and rename everything at that time? I honestly don't > remember, that was tens of thousands of patches ago :) I get that, but it seems pretty clear that at the time, the intent was to replace debugfs_remove_recursive() with debugfs_remove(). The C function is named debugfs_remove() and the macro is called debugfs_remove_recursive(). What you're saying now is that the C function should be renamed to debugfs_remove_recursive() and the macro should be swapped. I don't think that's a good idea. > > I recently added a patch to Nouveau that used debugfs_remove() to clean up > > all debugfs entries > > specifically because it operates recursively. > > That's great, I'm not objecting to that, just that we need to stick with > one or the other and I'd prefer the "recursive" name as that makes it > blindingly obvious what is happening here while without it, people can > get confused. Well, wouldn't you think it's confusing to call a function named debugfs_remove_recursive() in order to remove a single file? If you want, I can change the documentation to say, "please use debugfs_remove_recursive() to remove directories, and debugfs_remove() to remove files". We could also modify debugfs_remove_recursive() to issue a WARN if it is called on a file.
