Re: Un-sucking EINVAL (was: ip# on bridge members)

Poul-Henning Kamp:
> The ip# on bridge member interfaces is yet another example of why
> "EINVAL" is the undisputedly least helpful errno of them all.
> 
> The laconic "Invalid argument" leaves both the userland programmer
> and the user to guess what might be wrong.
 
you are completely right.  since we (for some reason, that i don't
really understand) can't add new error codes to errno, we should stop
using errno to indicate errors except where POSIX requires this.

> We should give errno a text-partner, so kernel code can:

i am open to other solutions here, but i intend to convert bridge(4) to
use netlink for configuration, which allows us to return a real error
message that ifconfig can print.