Re: [PATCH v3 0/7] Hexdump Enhancements

[Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>]

On Thu, 2019-06-20 at 11:14 +1000, Alastair D'Silva wrote:
> On Wed, 2019-06-19 at 17:35 -0700, Joe Perches wrote:
> > On Thu, 2019-06-20 at 09:15 +1000, Alastair D'Silva wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2019-06-19 at 09:31 -0700, Joe Perches wrote:
> > > > On Mon, 2019-06-17 at 12:04 +1000, Alastair D'Silva wrote:
> > > > > From: Alastair D'Silva <alastair@d-silva.org>
> > > > > 
> > > > > Apologies for the large CC list, it's a heads up for those
> > > > > responsible
> > > > > for subsystems where a prototype change in generic code causes
> > > > > a
> > > > > change
> > > > > in those subsystems.
> > > > > 
> > > > > This series enhances hexdump.
> > > > 
> > > > Still not a fan of these patches.
> > > 
> > > I'm afraid there's not too much action I can take on that, I'm
> > > happy to
> > > address specific issues though.
> > > 
> > > > > These improve the readability of the dumped data in certain
> > > > > situations
> > > > > (eg. wide terminals are available, many lines of empty bytes
> > > > > exist,
> > > > > etc).
> > 
> > I think it's generally overkill for the desired uses.
> 
> I understand where you're coming from, however, these patches make it a
> lot easier to work with large chucks of binary data. I think it makes
> more sense to have these patches upstream, even though committed code
> may not necessarily have all the features enabled, as it means that
> devs won't have to apply out-of-tree patches during development to make
> larger dumps manageable.
> 
> > > > Changing hexdump's last argument from bool to int is odd.
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > Think of it as replacing a single boolean with many booleans.
> > 
> > I understand it.  It's odd.
> > 
> > I would rather not have a mixture of true, false, and apparently
> > random collections of bitfields like 0xd or 0b1011 or their
> > equivalent or'd defines.
> > 
> 
> Where's the mixture? What would you propose instead?

create a hex_dump_to_buffer_ext with a new argument
and a new static inline for the old hex_dump_to_buffer
without modifying the argument list that calls
hex_dump_to_buffer with whatever added argument content
you need.

Something like:

static inline
int hex_dump_to_buffer(const void *buf, size_t len, int rowsize,
		       int groupsize, char *linebuf, size_t linebuflen,
		       bool ascii)
{
	return hex_dump_to_buffer_ext(buf, len, rowsize, groupsize,
				      linebuf, linebuflen, ascii, 0);
}

and remove EXPORT_SYMBOL(hex_dump_to_buffer)