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Re: [Fwd: [ISC-Bugs #25979] What happened to the dhcp patch in ISC-Bugs #24697 (Debian Bug #616290)?]



Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> writes:

> Indeed, for any system with an extensible VFS it makes a lot more sense
> to implement only pathconf() than to specify a constant value that
> covers all possible filesystems.  But as you say there's a lot of
> software that depends on that constant.

Thanks to a lot of work by the Hurd folks, there's quite a bit less than
there used to be.  :)

I haven't looked at the patch in this thread, but most of the time that
I've seen PATH_MAX used in software, it's indicated a design flaw in an
interface: use of static buffers for file paths rather than adjusting to
arbitrary length of file names.  You can arguably "fix" it by defining
PATH_MAX to something arbitrary, but usually the better fix is to go back
and fix the incorrect choice of API to use a caller-provided buffer or to
do memory allocation instead.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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