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Re: The broken POSIX


   Date: Sun, 27 Jun 1999 23:08:53 -0700 (PDT)
   From: hjl@lucon.org (H.J. Lu)

   If we have to support the "broken" POSIX, it should be turned off by
   default. The default one should have the old behavior. And users
   will get the new "broken" POSIX behavior only if they define something
   like

   #define _BROKEN_POSIX_SOURCE

The POSIX behaviour is actually quite consistent.  Keep in mind that
the *_r interfaces are intended to make thread-safe programming
possible.  Returning an error value is exactly what the pthread_*
interfaces do.  

   I really hate user-visible changes like this.

Too bad!  Some of the interfaces provided by libc are taken from draft
standards.  There is always a (small) possibility that such an
interface will be changed in the final standard.  If this happens, we
should modify glibc as quick as possible to reflect those changes.  If
the interface is documented in the glibc documentation and the change
breaks the ABI as specified by that documentation, we should take
appropriate measures.  But if the function was not documented yet, the
user will be ``punished'' for using undocumented non-standard functions.

Mark

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