chflags(2)'s flags argument.

[Jilles Tjoelker]

On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 01:35:59AM +0100, Pawel Jakub Dawidek wrote:
> Currently this is a bit messy: chflags(2) and fchflags(2) take 'flags'
> argument of type unsigned long and lchflags(2) takes the same argument
> of type int. At least this is what you can see in manual page and in
> prototypes of those functions in sys/stat.h.

> However all of those syscalls are defined in syscalls.master to take the
> 'flags' argument of type int and this is what they use in kernel.

> I'd like to proposed the following patch:

> 	http://people.freebsd.org/~pjd/patches/chflags_int.patch

> It changes type of the 'flags' argument from unsigned long to int where
> possible.

> I believe this change won't break ABI, as the syscalls (apart from the
> prototypes) already expect int and I hope in doesn't break API in any
> really visible and destructive way. If you think otherwise, let me know.

I wonder if we want to keep all those ugly casts between the various
types for file flags. They are unnecessary and might get stale.

For example, if (fchflags(to_fd, (u_long)sbp->st_flags)) (or changed to
(int)). The cast may have been necessary in the bad old days without
prototypes.

> Note that the patch doesn't touch the strtofflags(3) function, as I
> believe it would break ABI and it doesn't touch the fflagstostr(3)
> function to stay consistent with strtofflags(3).

That's int and unsigned long. That's not the complete collection. The
st_flags member of struct stat is of type fflags_t which is a typedef
for uint32_t.

It is sad what a mess this is :(

> PS. Manual page text provided by jilles.

The manual page text is, in fact, in the chflagsat(2) patch.

-- 
Jilles Tjoelker