Re: [PATCH] [RFC] tty/serial: imx: make use of format specifier %dE

[Uwe Kleine-KÃnig]

On 8/29/19 3:43 PM, Andy Shevchenko wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 7:40 AM Uwe Kleine-KÃnig <uwe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> I created a patch that teaches printk et al to emit a symbolic error
>> name for an error valued integer[1]. With that applied
>>
>>         dev_err(&pdev->dev, "failed to get ipg clk: %dE\n", ret);
>>
>> emits
>>
>>         ... failed to get ipg clk: EPROBE_DEFER
>>
>> if ret is -EPROBE_DEFER. Petr Mladek (i.e. one of the printk
>> maintainers) had concerns if this would be well received and worth the
>> effort. He asked to present it to a few subsystems. So for now, this
>> patch converting the imx UART driver shouldn't be applied yet but it
>> would be great to get some feedback about if you think that being able
>> to easily printk (for example) "EIO" instead of "-5" is a good idea.
> 
>> Would it help you? Do you think it helps your users?
> 
> No, it makes sense only for debug where the user is supposed to be
> developer and thus needs anyway to know code base better than average.

Would you go so far as to claim that

	... failed to get ipg clk: -517

is better sometimes than the same message with a named error? I'd say it
is never better and in some cases worse because readers who don't
understand what -EPROBE_DEFER means won't understand -517 either. So
there is net win.

Best regards
Uwe

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