Getting rid of portable branch (Was: [PATCH 3/6] Fall back on utimes if futimes is not available)

Mark Wielaard mjw at redhat.com
Wed May 6 11:37:54 UTC 2015


On Wed, 2015-05-06 at 07:22 -0400, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
> > I would like to get rid of the portable branch. [...]  
> 
> What is the argument against getting rid of the portable branch by
> merging it into master?

It contains hacks that we don't want to have on master because they
either just conflict with current standards/implementations (like using
%a in scanf instead of %m), inefficient (busy looping to detect process
state changes, because of buggy kernels), have conditional code paths
(which are a pain to maintain/keep working and obscure the code) or have
workarounds that are subtly wrong (like in this case where switching
back to path based file manipulation after already having opened and
checked a file descriptor might open up possible security issues because
of Time-of-check Time-of-use race conditions).

If there are specific hacks you would like to see brought over from the
portable branch to master, please do propose and we can discuss them.
But I really think none of them are needed or should be used these days.

Cheers,

Mark


More information about the elfutils-devel mailing list