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Re: Why this strange change?


Hello,

On Sun, Jun 27, H.J. Lu wrote:

> Hi, Ulrich,
> 
> Your change
> 
> 1999-06-17  Ulrich Drepper  <drepper@cygnus.com>
> 
>         * nss/getXXbyYY_r.c: Return error code not -1. 
>         * nss/getXXent_r.c: Likewise.
> 
> breaks glibc and Linux very badly. Any codes like
> 
> 	if (getXXbyYY_r (......) < 0)
> 
> now don't work anymore since now getXXbyYY_r () returns errno which is
> a positive number. Did you mean to return NAGATIVE of the error code?
> Could you please double check all of your similar changes and fix them?
> 
> BTW, even if you can change all of
> 
> 	if (getXXbyYY_r (......) < 0)
> 
> in glibc, how do you change all the user codes? I am not sure it is a
> good idea to make a change like that. You changed ABI in fact.

Any user program, which checks for < 0, is broken. It doesn't matter
what glibc does, all other Unix uses the correct POSIX return values.
So you have an glibc 2 only source program which is not portable.
It's time to fix this source code.

  Thorsten

-- 
Thorsten Kukuk      http://www.suse.de/~kukuk/        kukuk@suse.de
SuSE GmbH           Schanzaeckerstr. 10             90443 Nuernberg
Linux is like a Vorlon.  It is incredibly powerful, gives terse,
cryptic answers and has a lot of things going on in the background.
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