Re: [PATCH 2/2] mmap.2: MAP_FIXED updated documentation

[Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)]

Hello Kees,

I'm late to the party, and only just caught up with the fuss :-).

On 12/14/2017 12:19 AM, Kees Cook wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 6:40 AM, Cyril Hrubis <chrubis@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Hi!
>>> You selected stupid name for a flag. Everyone and their dog agrees
>>> with that. There's even consensus on better name (and everyone agrees
>>> it is better than .._SAFE). Of course, we could have debate if it is
>>> NOREPLACE or NOREMOVE or ... and that would be bikeshed. This was just
>>> poor naming on your part.
>>
>> Well while everybody agrees that the name is so bad that basically
>> anything else would be better, there does not seem to be consensus on
>> which one to pick. I do understand that this frustrating and fruitless.
> 
> Based on the earlier threads where I tried to end the bikeshedding, it
> seemed like MAP_FIXED_NOREPLACE was the least bad option.
> 
>> So what do we do now, roll a dice to choose new name?
>>
>> Or do we ask BFDL[1] to choose the name?
> 
> I'd like to hear feedback from Michael Kerrisk, as he's had to deal
> with these kinds of choices in the past. I'm fine to ask Linus too. I
> just want to get past the name since the feature is quite valuable.
> 
> And if Michal doesn't want to touch this patch any more, I'm happy to
> do the search/replace/resend. :P

Something with the prefix MAP_FIXED_ seems to me obviously desirable,
both to suggest that the function is similar, and also for easy
grepping of the source code to look for instances of both.
MAP_FIXED_SAFE didn't really bother me as a name, but 
MAP_FIXED_NOREPLACE (or MAP_FIXED_NOCLOBBER) seem slightly more 
descriptive of what the flag actually does, so a little better.

Cheers,

Michael

-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/