On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 09:41:57AM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
On 06/21/2011 09:53 AM, Matthias Bolte wrote:
[1] http://libvirt.org/html/libvirt-libvirt.html#virConnectClose
In contrast to the documentation virConnectClose returns the remaining reference count of the connection after unref'ing it. This means virConnectClose returns -1 on error and returns 0 when there is no reference left and the connection is really closed. When it returns > 0 then the connection isn't closed yet, but is kept open because there are still objects alive that depend on it. For example when you open a connection and get a virDomainPtr from it then the refcount of the connection is increased, because the domain object depends on it. When the domain object is freed then the refcount of the connection is decreased again.
All objects in libvirt like connections, domains, networks etc are reference counted. But in contrast to virConnectClose other free functions like virDomainFree don't return the remaining reference count, they really just return -1 or 0. So the question is: do we change virConnectClose to really just return -1 or 0, or do we update the documentation, because someone might depend on virConnectClose allowing to detect via its return value whether the connection was really closed or not.
At this point, I worry that changing return values might break existing code, so I would favor a documentation update, but I'd also like to hear an opinion from DV or danpb.
Agreed, the code has been running taht way forever, this is a documentation bug, let's fix the documentation, Daniel -- Daniel Veillard | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ daniel@veillard.com | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/ http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library http://libvirt.org/