Re: [PATCH] Let libelf.h's loff_t fall back to off_t

[Josh Stone <jistone at redhat dot com>]

On 10/09/2015 02:57 PM, Roland McGrath wrote:
>> However, I'm afraid to change signedness, if only because -1 is used in
>> error conditions, e.g. returned from elf_update().  Someone checking <0
>> will be in for a bad time.
> 
> Yeah, that sounds like a wise fear.  But maybe Elf64_Off is OK (and
> preferable even) for the cases that are not return values?

In practice we're limited to 2^63-1 off_t anyway, so the only benefit
would be enforcing that they can't be negative, right?

I dunno, seems like a small benefit that still has a chance to perturb
users.  Even just say Elf_Data.d_off comparisons may lead to "comparing
signed and unsigned" warnings if we change our part, and I know I like
-Werror in my builds.

>> How about just int64_t?  We already pull stdint.h for elf.h, so it seems
>> fine to include and use that in libelf.h too.
> 
> Sold!  We already have <sys/types.h> which covers <stdint.h> too.  But we
> only ever had that for off_t/loff_t, so just change it to <stdint.h> and
> use int64_t.

I'll just do this for now.

Thanks!