Looking at the ooooold open bugs... I looked at this bug for a while. Install-info and friends are written in perl. Perl makes it very hard and unportable to use fcntl locks, since there's no portable way to access the struct flock definition. This *could* be dealt with using c2ph, making a different version of the perl scripts for each architecture. But that doesn't sound like a reasonable thing to do. Someone could add to the standard perl distribution to provide an interface to struct flock, but that sounds like a really long-term goal. :-P To use fcntl, a rewrite in a different language would appear be the most plausible thing to do, and that doesn't seem very reasonable either. (So I suggest closing this -- though not the bug it's merged with, which is different -- as wontfix.)
Perl encourages the use of flock instead. I think I've figured out a way to change install-info to use flock correctly, although it's a little ugly. The algorithm reads the old dir file, writes a new dir file, and then renames the new one on top of the old one. An exclusive lock must be acquired on the old file before it is read, and on the new file before it is written, and neither lock can be dropped until the rename completes. I could provide a patch to that effect if anyone's interested; it's straightforward enough. -- Nathanael Nerode <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Make sure your vote will count. http://www.verifiedvoting.org/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
