Re: flag day for 64-bit?

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Fri, Jun 07, 2002 at 04:25:01PM -0700, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Roland McGrath <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > > This doesn't actually break source compatibility, but it does break
> > > binary compatibility, AFAICT.  
> > 
> > You are either naive or have vast trust in the cleanliness of all user code.
> 
> You mean there is user code out there that stores file offsets in
> ints?  :)

Uh, yeah, for example to pass it to fseek:

 - Function: int fseek (FILE *STREAM, long int OFFSET, int WHENCE)

But the system does like to do it as well, for example in ftell:

 - Function: long int ftell (FILE *STREAM)

> > Well, there's little flags and there's big flags.  The plan I described
> > would have the (small) set of consequences I described.  Your plan would
> > require recompiling everything everywhere yet again.  Jeff might kill you.
> 
> Hrm, that might be the best option over all...

It surely is.  Everyone who knows LFS would say that :)

> What's "LFS"?

http://ftp.sas.com/standards/large.file/

This is something that the world at large has recognized and attacked, and
is actually working on to resolve.  LFS is very careful (you might say
cowardish) in not breaking anything that worked before, which we would not
care about so much, but others had to.  In any case, trying to be different
here just to push the world further and faster towards the goal of off_t
cleanliness is an unnecessary burden for us, as people are aware of this
problem and actually fixing their code gradually (so this is different
from MAXPATHLEN for example).

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org address@hidden
Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    address@hidden
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