Re: Environment handling broken in /bin/sh with changes to {get,set,put}env()

From: Andrey Chernov <ache_at_nagual.pp.ru>
Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2007 20:53:37 +0400
On Wed, Jul 04, 2007 at 05:41:10PM +0100, Robert Watson wrote:
> 
> I assume I'm not the only person with this concern, but -- shouldn't we 
> worry that subtle changes in the semantics of very basic and widely used 
> system APIs might not result in more of exactly this sort of problem?  

This happens due to improper putenv()->setenv() transition in sh code, 
not directly because of semantics change. F.e. it works in my commited 
code long ago.

Very basic and widely used system's APIs (excepting BSD one) already do 
proper thing.

> While I'm supportive of the general aim of improving the portability of our 
> APIs, environmental variables are managed by large numbers of programs in 
> rather subtle ways--do we generally feel that this recent work will 
> decrease or increase the number of subtle bugs?  After all, we've changed 
> long-standing semantics for the APIs...

Just re-read old discussion. Long-standing semantics most system agree 
(Sun, Linux) already do that way. Only BSD doesn't.

No surprise than that old BSD-specific code is full of bugs and not 
portable.

-- 
http://ache.pp.ru/
Received on Wed Jul 04 2007 - 14:53:41 UTC

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