27 Jan 2003

Mon, 27 Jan 2003 20:42:11 GMT

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*

11 Jan 2003

Sat, 11 Jan 2003 14:05:12 GMT

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

Advogato blog for guidod

27 Jan 2003

11 Jan 2003