On Sun, Dec 27, 1998 at 04:22:05PM -0500, Roland McGrath wrote: > > The current hurd <sys/params.h> does define NBBY, NGROUPS, MAXSYMLINKS, > CANBSIZ, and NCARGS. The NCARGS and NGROUPS definitions are fictitious, > since there are no actual limits on those things.
Silly me, I quoted to much. Sorry. > > Especially the last two are used frequently. > > No program that uses them unconditionally complies to 1003.1-1996. Granted (i don't have the standard here, but I believe you). The question is, what to do with those programs? Is there a standard way to rewrite the parts that are "broken"? > > Notice that neither PATH_MAX nor OPEN_MAX are defined in Hurd, too. > > > > Why? > > Because there are no limits. Aside from runtime memory availability, there > is no limit whatsoever on the length of a file name imposed by the system > architecture (individual filesystems may have limits, which pathconf > reports). The only limit on open file descriptors is the soft resource > limit settable with setrlimit(RLIM_NOFILE). I suspected something like this. > A POSIX-compliant program takes absence of these definitions to mean there > is no limit determinable at compile-time, and uses sysconf or pathconf as > appropriate to ascertain the run-time limits; in most cases, they can > return -1 to indicate there is no ascertainable limit. When that is true > on the Hurd, that is what it returns. > > I can dig the standard out and quote chapter and verse if it would help. Preferable would be a cut&paste approach to fix those programs in question :) Maybe I should file bug reports, too. However, is it okay to insert a fixed value just as a hack? Thank you for your (quick!) reply, Marcus -- "Rhubarb is no Egyptian god." Debian GNU/Linux finger brinkmd@ Marcus Brinkmann http://www.debian.org master.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] for public PGP Key http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Marcus.Brinkmann/ PGP Key ID 36E7CD09
