Re: DPKG not compiling due to differences between Alpha and Intel...

[kai@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen)]

ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk (Ian Jackson)  wrote on 24.01.96 in <[🔎] m0teupl-0002YUC@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>:

> Does anyone know what POSIX says on this issue ?

I mislaid my original POSIX.1, but the very reliable "The POSIX.1 Standard  
- A Programmers Guide" says that Posix has

struct sigaction {
   void     (*sa_handler)(); /* Signal handler function */
   sigset_t sa_mask;         /* Extra mask during handling */
   int      sa_flags;        /* Only used for SIGCHLD */
   /* Possibly other members */
};

and in their example of "a strictly POSIX conforming program" they  
initialize a new struct sigaction by initializing only these three  
members.

This seems to be a general POSIX (and ANSI C) philosophy: as long as you  
only use POSIX interfaces, you can safely ignore any members an  
implementation might add to a structure.

Now if libc implements this correctly is a completely different question!

However, if you absolutely want to be on the safe side, you might simply  
memset(my_sigaction, 0, sizeof(my_sigaction)); - I don't believe there's  
anything wrong with that.

MfG Kai