[Xcb] Naming standard for X error constants

[Barton C Massey]

In message <08385FA5-2003-492D-AE7D-ECAD1AA55864 at quirkster.com> you wrote:
> Jamey reverted the experimental patch to qualify error constants with  
> XCB_BAD_*, because some of the extensions were already doing this  
> work by hand, resulting in XCB_BAD_BAD_* for their errors. (I don't  
> know why Jamey didn't just fix the extensions.) I would like to  
> figure out how to qualify error constants once and for all before we  
> make another release.
> 
> My next proposal is to qualify errors by appending *_ERROR. Can  
> anyone think of a reason this would not work or otherwise be hard to  
> implement?
> 
> Really, I don't see how we could recommend XCB for production code  
> (which unlike demo code, does strict error checking) until we  
> finalize this. In my opinion, it is not feasible to leave the error  
> constants unqualified as they are.

I think it would be feasible to leave things as they are,
although it may be undesirable.  I am uncomfortable with any
proposal that just goes around slapping prefixes or suffixes
on constants clearly named in the protocol documentation; at
the very least I think this requires forking a copy of the
protocol document and updating it to the new names.

Actually, I'd be pretty comfortable with the idea of us
taking over the protocol document anyway, and I doubt anyone
would fight us over it much :-).  What we really need is a
document-master who will gather up all the protocol and
extension source documents, get them into a common format
and coherent form, and then maintain changes to them as
needed.  Note that I'm not volunteering for this :-).

Failing that, I think I'd support something more limited to
address our current problems; alias the core errors to
XCB_BAD_* as per common practice and leave the extension
authors to figure out what they want to do on a
per-extension basis.

    Bart