Is it considered to be ok to not check the return code of close(2) in base?

[Rodney W. Grimes]

> On Mon, Jan 01, 2018 at 08:52:57AM -0800, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jan 01, 2018 at 04:14:33PM +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> > > > But this is bikeshedding at this point anyway.
> > > 
> > > +1
> > 
> > Bike shedding is good, people learn things from it.  I never knew that
> > assert was altered by NDEBUG for example, thanks for that enlightenment
> 
> Um, does the FreeBSD man page not start like the Linux man page with
> 
>        If  the  macro  NDEBUG  was  defined  at the moment <assert.h> was last
>        included, the macro assert() generates no code, and hence does nothing
>        at all.
> 
> ?

It further says that an assert() appeared in V6, and I bet that NDEBUG
didnt exist at that time.  I dont read man pages for something I have
been using for 20+ years.   Further investage leads me to learn that
Turing and von Neumann both wrote of assertions, so maybe my old finger
memory has been broken by standards that arrose long after I learned
how to do "check error codes" when calling functions, even if they
seem impossible or improbable.

> And bikeshedding has the effect of making people hit the delete key.  I've
> deleted without reading about 80% of this thread.  So if there was signal
> in that 80%, I for one, did not get it.

:-(  And people wont even engage in disucssions sighting "oh that well
just be a bike shed."  So rather than having discussions we have anarchy.

So lets have a bikeshed on bikesheds?

 
> And the amount of back and forth on something that is this basic is sort
> of mind numbing.  As a new person on FreeBSD it doesn't show the project
> in a good light.  Just sayin.

Basics are as important as fine details, and given the disparity that
occured during this "bikeshead" it shows that there are even wide
spread opionions on the very basics of if you should check error
returns from function calls, and what ways there are of doing that.

Mind numbing, perhaps, pointless, no I do not believe so.

-- 
Rod Grimes                                                 rgrimes at freebsd.org