On Thu, 5 Jun 2025 at 07:51, Miklos Szeredi <miklos@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> - The above fix contains a cast to non-const, which is not actually
> needed. So add the necessary helpers postfixed with _c that allow the
> cast to be removed (touches vfs files but only in trivial ways)
Grr.
I despise those "trivial ways".
In particular, I despise how this renames the backing_file_user_path()
helper to something actively *worse*.
The "_c()" makes no sense as a name. Yes, I realize that the "c"
stands for "const", but it still makes absolutely zero sense, since
everybody wants the const version.
The only user of the non-const version is the *ointernal*
implementation that is never exported to other modules, and that could
have the special name.
Although I suspect it doesn't even need it, it could just use the
backing_file(f) macro directly and that should just be moved to
internal.h, and then the 'const'ness would come from the argument as
required.
In fact, most of the _internal_ vfs users don't even want the
non-const version, ie as far as I can tell the user in
file_get_write_access() would be perfectly happy with the const
version too.
So you made the *normal* case have an odd name, and then kept the old
sane name for the case nobody else really wants to see.
If anything, the internal non-const version is the one that should be
renamed (and *not* using some crazy "_nc()" postfix nasty crud). Not
the one that gets exported and that everybody wants.
So I could fix up that last commit to not hate it, but honestly, I
don't want that broken state in the kernel in the first place.
Please do that thing properly. Not this hacky and bass-ackwards way.
Linus
