Bug#871956: lintian: false positive: binary-file-built-without-LFS-support on x32

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Fri, 2017-09-01 at 21:35:07 +0200, Adam Borowski wrote:
> And what AC_SYS_LARGEFILE does, at least on Linux, is to return a hardcoded
> setting so programs switch from off_t to off64_t whether they need to or
> not.  This does the right thing on old 32-bit archs and is harmless on
> 64-bit and new 32-bit.

Just to make this extra clear, when setting _FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64,
the types and functions are transparently redirected to the 64-bit
variants if need be, so nothing needs to be changed in the code.

> The problem is in snowflake packages that do things their own way and enable
> LFS only when it's actually needed.  Here's where the lintian false positive
> triggers.

This is a common misconception. Pretty much all programs need to
be LFS enabled, because even if these programs do not handle large
files they will probably still fail when encountering files in the
filsystem with large inode numbers (or other large metadata) for
example.

Thanks,
Guillem