On 05/20/10 02:06 PM, I. Szczesniak wrote:
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 9:18 PM, Don Cragun<[email protected]> wrote:
The reason that LOGNAME_MAX was stuck at 8 in<limits.h> for so long
is that the System V ABIs and the SCDs require that value.
Solaris 10 has been breaking ABI requirements around the edges for a
few years. Since this is case is departing from more ABI
requirements, should it have a major release binding? Or, should an
opinion be written for this case acknowledging that the ARC knows
that this case violates the ABIs and that the decision to do so is
intentional (without setting precedent to otherwise ignore the ABI)?
Once upon a time, there was a gang of four working on a
definition of what would be the limits of the changes going into
"Solaris next", whether it would be classified as a major or minor
release, and what would constitute the basis for determining whether
or not an implementation of OpenSolaris would be able to use the
Solaris trademark. Was a report ever produced by the gang? (I know
that at least half of the gang no longer works for Sun/Oracle.) Is
there any current plan to define any type of new Solaris ABI?
I agree with Don that at *least* an opinion must be written for such a
change. You will at least break major software like Informix with this
change.
Huh?
I'm not disagreeing that an opinion is warranted, but it seems to me
that we're lifting a restriction; whether software is busted or not as a
consequence depends on whether
a) the software is coded properly to inquire about limits using the
proper APIs.
b) the site has chosen to exercise longer usernames
Both must be true for rationale cases of breakage. Of course there is
an irrationale case as well:
c) software inquiries the limit, but is defective and unable to handle a
value other than the legacy one (for example by using a fixed size
array, but bzeroing the array using the results of the inquiry to
determine the length!) Obviously such software would be so horrendously
buggy that we can't possibly be held accountable for this kind of breakage.
- Garrett
Irek
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