The freshmeat editorial has been finally published, and some talkback led me to add two new pages to the largefile-problems webpages.
Furthermore, a linuxbase.org submission has been sent, since LBS ships a tool `appchk` to test conformance of binaries including its imports. It would be natural to add a check for largefile-mismatch in there.
However, there was no feedback so far on LSB, and perhaps it would be the only body to be able to drop 64on32 completely. *sigh*
do not use off_t in headers - largefile sensitivity bugs!
Through a discussion on alt.os.linux.mandrake, I had to notice that every library has a risk of being broken when using the system off_t type in its exported interfaces, including structures and function synopsis.
The point comes from the fact that systems like linux and solaris are "largefile sensitive" - a -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE will shift the "off_t" type from being a 32bit entity into a 64bit entity. This will make for a nice and pretty callframe mismatch.
A autoconf'ed lib 'centric treatment of the topic is given in:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.autoconf.general/1893
Grepping a bit through files on my system, I did notice that even zlib/gzip is affected (and only by luck it is not triggered) and kdelib header files (in kio) has off_t as well. Bug reports were filed to the respective projects.
People should worry and learn about this problem area sooner than later
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