Re: last days of htdig

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm@polyomino.org.uk>]

On Sat, 27 Sep 2003, Hans-Peter Nilsson wrote:

> Off the top of my head, I think gnu "sort", sizeof int and
> sizeof long (or if we're lucky, just size_t :-) would be the
> obvious open sores^Wissues.

GNU utilities have been compiling by default with -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64
for ages (though this doesn't help if they would need too much memory,
just with large files).  The problem would be whether htdig (and any
libraries it uses) is clean about using off_t where appropriate (including
not using library interfaces such as fseek and ftell, in their place
fseeko and ftello) and whether it needs too much memory.  And the large
files support in many of the GNU utilities probably isn't much exercised
beyond their testsuites.

Glibc hides the question of what kernel you're running on from the program
- a program built to use large-files interfaces doesn't itself need to be
built with a >= 2.4 kernel, it just needs to be run under one with a glibc
built against headers from one, and if either of the conditions fails at
runtime there will just be errors when a file would get too large.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm@polyomino.org.uk