Glibc change exposing bugs

Posted Nov 12, 2010 7:30 UTC (Fri) by hozelda (guest, #19341)
In reply to: Glibc change exposing bugs by nix
Parent article: Glibc change exposing bugs

I think the man pages that say "should" may want to clarify that issue a little better; however, it does appear to have the correct information.

If you use Linux, the Linux documentation should be authoritative. Hopefully, it will agree with POSIX and C99 (or whatever is the latest memcpy standard) as much as possible. If there is a reason for a change (or to document a Linux bug) and you use Linux, I would pay attention to the Linux documentation and treat everything else as advisory. If you use Red Hat or whatever other distro, I would look treat those docs as authoritative and not whatever other standard you think should apply.

A different matter is arguing about keeping Linux in sync with POSIX, etc, but if you want to build software that will work, short of maintaining your personal set of patches not accepted by upstream, you would probably want to code to "Linux" (at least for the Linux port).

Glibc change exposing bugs

Posted Nov 12, 2010 7:37 UTC (Fri) by hozelda (guest, #19341) [Link]

Before you say that a man page is not authoritative, I don't know the answer to that but it depends on your Linux vendor. In practice you will want to follow the major standards and consider otherwise to probably be an error in the man page; however, if you vendor says that X and Y are the documents, then that is what you go by (perhaps bringing up doubtful points to your vendor's attention). In particular, if you don't like a vendor that hacks Linux to bypass certain standards, then change vendors or ask for help in identifying these hacks.

Glibc change exposing bugs

Posted Nov 14, 2010 21:19 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (5 responses)

No, you normally want to code to POSIX. Carefully-written software does not *require* much if any porting to work on Linux rather than Solaris or IRIX or even sometimes AIX. If it's POSIX, it should work.

(You might need to adjust for bits of older systems that are non-POSIX, but that is really quite rare these days unless you're aiming for some strange emulation layer like Cygwin. Also you might need to do byteorder detection and so forth, but, again, that's stuff which is left unspecified by POSIX. You should not generally have to use Linux-specific stuff unless you really want to, and you normally shouldn't want to.)

Glibc change exposing bugs

Posted Nov 14, 2010 22:03 UTC (Sun) by promotion-account (guest, #70778) [Link] (3 responses)

You should not generally have to use Linux-specific stuff unless you really want to, and you normally shouldn't want to.

I'm sure you know this, but for some applications, POSIX is not really enough. Thus, for example, the need for some portable abstraction libraries like libevent.

Glibc change exposing bugs

Posted Nov 14, 2010 23:08 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes, exactly. But at worst you should stuff the nonportability into a library with an API which can be replicated on other platforms (or make that library as portable as possible, and keep it a separate library to keep the ugly away from everyone else.)

(btw, your account name is... *interesting*.)

Glibc change exposing bugs

Posted Nov 15, 2010 1:37 UTC (Mon) by promotion-account (guest, #70778) [Link] (1 responses)

(btw, your account name is... *interesting*.)

That's descriptive anonymity :)

Readers usually give higher weight to subscribers opinions here, so this handle honestly states that I'm a promoted guest.

Glibc change exposing bugs

Posted Nov 15, 2010 10:39 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Ah. I interpreted it as 'account bought to promote something else', and got confused because most advertisers would try to lie about it and *not* mention their affiliations :)

'Promotion' is a word with many meanings...

Glibc change exposing bugs

Posted Nov 15, 2010 8:13 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

you are assuming that the program authors care about Irix, AIX, Solaris, or anything else.

most programs do not start off being written portably, usually portability is something that shows up after the program starts being used when people ask about using it on other platforms (and it's not uncommon for it to wait until those people asking submit patches)

not saying that this is right, just saying that it's the way things are. When Solaris dominated the same thing happened favoring it.